Reciprocal link exchange simply means that you ask for your link to be put on someone's web site and in return link back to them. Getting good, solid links from related web sites should be part of your strategy. This way you get more valuable traffic and the attention of the search engines, resulting in better rankings. This system is straight forward and very popular among web masters.

Ideally you want your website to be so popular that people just refer to it, whether it be because of cool features, generous affiliate programs or complementary content and articles. The thing is, unless you have at least some sites linking to one of your web pages you are not going to get noticed. If you are just starting out with a new web site you’re going to have to contact other webmaster and ask them if they would be interested in reciprocal linking.

The competition is huge, so be prepared that not everybody wants to exchange links with you, especially when they think your page is competitive to theirs. But how can you find those quality sites willing to link back to you then?

How to get quality reciprocal links from other web sites?

Your first "official act" should be to make sure your visitors can actually contact YOU by providing a contact form or at least an e-mail address on your web site. If your site is attractive enough they might find it and approach you with a link exchange request, without you having to do anything. Provide as much information as you to make the whole process as easy as possible, be clear and keep it simple. People want to know what to expect before they spend any time on a request. But this is only part of your work, there is much more you can do, actively.

As explained a bit earlier, for better search engine acceptability you should provide different titles and descriptions people can use to link to you. This way you reduce the probability that they are all using the same anchor tags on their pages.

Examine your competitors' sites and complementary sites

Do a search on the internet and examine the links or resource pages of topical related web sites you find. These sites are potential reciprocal link partners. If you point to them, then they might just as well return the favour and put a reference to you on their site. Now, examine THEIR resource pages for even more links, and so on down the chain. Keep doing this and you should end up with a long list of quality sites. All you need to do now is to ask them if they would like to trade links with you!

Setting up reciprocal links

• Once you have found good, quality sites link to them from your site first!
• Then send a short, friendly email to the webmaster complimenting him/her on something you truly like about that page and say that you have linked to their site. Don't forget to give them the URL of the page where you've placed your link. Ask for a link back to your page, suggesting an appropriate place where you would like to have your link appear.
• Now be patient! If you don't hear back from them after two or three weeks send a polite reminder - it's easy for emails to get lost. Alternatively, you might want to consider the "old fashioned" way and use a phone or even write a letter, this certainly will get their attention and gives a good impression.
• Keep track of the sites you have linked to and requested links from, as you need to know who you have contacted already and who you have not. It also simplifies monitoring all your partners' web sites whether they are loayal or not. It has been seen, that some webmasters removed links from their site again, increasing the number of only inbound links and hence lowering your web site's potential of ranking higher while simultaneously increasing theirs. What you want are permanent links, that don't dissapear after a few months and put you back to square one.

Companies specialized in reciprocal link building

As mentioned earlier, not every webmaster might respond to your link exchange request the way you want, especially when they have a higher page rank. It can take time and several attempts before you even find a web site that fully meets your expectations as well as responses positively to your request.

You will have to find a lot of sites, approach many webmasters, convince them why trading links with you would be benefitial and keep track of all your activities. This is hard work and time consuming! It may not sound like much, but if you have to do this several times it can soon become very frustrating.

Fortunately there are companies that have the experience and the necessary tools at their disposal to make this job as easy and rewarding for you as possible.

You can hire companies which specialize in finding quality reciprocal, permanent linking partners for you. This will save you time, as you can skip the whole process of locating and persuading webmasters to link to you. This is all done for you! Good companies have a comprehensive directory of potential partners all categorized by their industry, which makes it a walk in the park to find those relevant sites that are so important if you want to be among the top listed pages.

BRL build-reciprocal-links.com is one company which provides this service. Registration for any website with quality content and decent Google's Popularity Index is completely free.

Affordability - How much does it cost?

These services are usually reasonable priced and in view of what they can achieve for you definately worth the money. Prices vary in different industries. In the long run it pays off to do networking, this should not be underestimated. If this is an avenue you wish to persue you might want to check out the following programs offering reciprocal linking tools. All the web sites included in these campaigns are legal, genuine and hard-working web sites wanting to boost their link popularity at Google and the other search engines through the unique and popular two-way linking strategy.

BRL Build Reciprocal Links

Get traffic from high quality web sites to your site and improved rankings in ALL major search engines.

Arelis by Axandra

They guarantee you top 10 rankings on Google and all other major search engines or give you your money back! You can not go wrong with that! Being in the top 10 search results is priceless. Admittedly, this is a pretty bold statement, but what do you have to loose? This company would not have been able to stay in business since 1997 if they did'nt live up to their promise.

This program takes a lot of tedium out of finding reciprocal links partners.

These are only examples of the many features offered! Download the free Arelis trial to test them all and see what this program can do for you.

LinkMachine

LinkMachine is a reciprocal link exchange management software that makes it easy to find and contact quality link partners, generate custom link pages that match your site and keep track of reciprocal links. LinkMachine is a PhP application that runs on your web server. So it can automatically update your link pages the moment a change is made - no need to upload files each time a new link is added. You can try LinkMachine free for 10 days and see if it does what it says. Play around and see if you feel like dropping the cash for this product. This product also comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. This gives you even longer to test this program, so there's no risk.

Do you think that "reciprocal linking" is a good idea?

It is a very good idea indeed, provided the links you keep are relevant to your site! If you are in a given industry, it stands to reason that there will be sites that your visitors would want to know about and that their visitors would want to know about your site in turn.

It might not be as highly regarded as the one-way link building strategy in terms of the voting system and PageRank system respectively employed by Google, but it certainly is an inexpensive and yet very effective additional strategy that should be part of your arsenal of SEO techniques.

Also, every single visitor of the sites you have exchanged links with automatically becomes a potential visitor of your page as well. Your link will be shown on all theses web sites and through the traffic generated by those links your popularity increases proportional, in which case this kind of link exchange is most appropriate. If used in a systematic manner and through a focused link building program, reciprocal link exchange can significantly contribute to promoting your website effectively and efficiently.

In our opinion a high PageRank (PR) does not necessarily mean to have an advantage over other lower PR web sites, as a higher PR value is of no significance unless it directly contributes towards higher natural search engines rankings. Research has shown that a lower PR web page can rank better than higher PR web pages, simply by having quality inbound links.

Also, you can still rank high with having a low PageRank yourself and only a few pages linking to you, if you exchange links with a another page that is considered important.

For example, page B has a higher PagRank than page C, even though it has only one webpage pointing to it. But the one it has is much higher valued.

Common Misconceptions

"Only link to pages that have a higher page rank than yours!"

Linking strategies that EXCLUDE perfectly relevant web sites only because of their traffic volume or page ranking is EXACTLY THE WRONG WAY! Not only does this strategy make the task of earning links even more difficult as it is (unless you are using one of the aforementioned services), but also will cause you to lose valuable traffic.

Everybody needs to start somewhere and newly established web sites tend to gain popularity much quicker at the beginning than their counterparts. So you want to catch them while they are still growing and willing to trade links with you. Granted, the "big" sites earn you more credits, but usually need much more persuation to link to you, that is of corse if they not quite simply ignore you.

You need to build a solid link base with relevant sites pointing to you as quickly as you can. So why waste your time with sites that are unlikely to even consider your request when you can build more links instead and compensate for the lack of backlinks from high ranking pages.

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