Reciprocal Link Resources

Search engines are good at ranking websites based on keyword phrases. These keyword phrases are the search terms someone might use to find the information that's on your site.

Doing the things that will make the search engines associate certain keyword phrases with your site is the goal of many webmasters. This activity has been called "search engine optimization" or SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable and hardly visible website and a traffic magnet website.

One important factor in getting search engines to associate keyword phrases with your site is the link text used by other web sites when they link to your site.

You see links on just about every web page you view. The text links are usually colored blue and underlined. The phrase in the text that forms the link is critical to getting your site listed for the proper keyword phrases.

Your goal is to get other sites to link to your site using text links having the keyword phrases you want to rank high on in the search engines. When enough sites link to your site with important keyword phrases, your site will begin to be ranked higher is the search engine results. And, that's a good thing for you.

There are several ways to get other sites to link to your site:

1. Reciprocal Linking Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking Site B links to Site A
3. Multi-Site Linking Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking Site Directory A links to Site A

Reciprocal links is simply exchanging links with another site. You provide a link to their site and, in return, they will provide a link to your site. And, in doing this you get to choose the link text they will use and they tell you the link text you should use.

One way links can come about in several ways. Other sites may find your site to have valuable information, and they simply provide a link to your site on one of their pages. In this case you often do not have control over the link text they use. But, the link will often be valuable, nonetheless.

You can also purchase one-way links. There are individual sites that will offer links for a certain fee every month. There are also organizations that have multiple sites that can links to your site, again for a monthly fee.

Multiple site linking is often seen today, most often involving three sites. Your site links to another site while a third site links back to your site. This can be good if the site linking back to you is a real content site, but too often the sites offered to link back to you are simply "link farms" with no other purpose than to contain hundreds or thousands of links.

Directory links are also sometimes good. Directories can be "link farms" that exist simply to provide links. Other directories have real value. Everyone tries to get into the Open Directory because links from that directory have high value in the "eyes" of search engines.

There are some things to watch out for as you work to get incoming links from other websites.

The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.

The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.

Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.

So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

So, go out an get links with the proper keyword phrases back to your website. You'll see the difference good quality links can make.

We hope the following reciprocal link resources will be valuable in your efforts.

If at any time your wish to communicate with us, please feel free to contact us.

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