Reciprocal Links - safe time and get it done at ease.

How to get reciprocal links and its importance?

Reciprocal links are arranged or said to be, when two web sites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links are also known as "link swaps", "link exchanges" and "link partners".

Reciprocal links help you in two ways:

1. They increase your web site traffic, as a result of people clicking on the links.

2. Reciprocal links also play a major role in boosting your rankings in search engines.


Warning: Late in 2005, Google's Matt Cutts made it clear that it's possible to "overdo" reciprocal links. Getting good, solid, reciprocal links should be part of your links strategy, not your total marketing strategy.

When ranking sites, search engines take into account the number and quality of the sites that links to you.


How to get good quality links?

Persuading good quality, relevant sites to link to you can be tedious, time-consuming and frustrating. Here are some tips to increase your chances of success.

One great way to find link partners is to do searches in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to find sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors. Although many sites do link to direct competitors, figuring that the benefits outweigh any disadvantages.


Examine their link pages

A refinement of this strategy is to visit your competitors' sites and complementary sites and examine their link pages or resource pages. The sites you'll find there linking to them are potential reciprocal links partners. They should be linking to you too. Now visit THEIR link pages and examine them, and so on down the chain. You should end up with a long list of good sites with which to exchange links.


How to set up reciprocal links

• Find GOOD QUALITY, complementary sites e.g forums.
• Place a link to them on your site. And
• Only AFTER you've placed a link to them, email the owner of the site a short friendly note. Address him or her by name. (If the name isn't on the site, you may be able to find it at DomainTools.com.)
• Genuinely praise some things you found on their site. If you can't find something worth praising, delete the site from your list, its not worth it. And
• Tell the web site owners that you've linked to their site, giving them the URL of the page where you've place the link to their site on yours. And
• Ask for a link back to your site, suggesting a page where the link would be appropriate. Then
• Wait patiently, if after three weeks there's been no reply, send a brief, polite, reminder. It's easy for emails to be lost, gone to spam box or overlooked. Or
• Use the phone and/or snail mail. A link from a good site is a very valuable thing. If you can't get noticed by email, consider trying a phone call or posting a letter. They're more expensive but also more likely to attract the answer you want.
• Keep an alphabetical record of sites you've linked to and requested links from. You need to know who you've contacted and who you haven't.

Want links from pages with high PageRank?

To boost their PageRank, some webmasters concentrate on getting links only from sites that have high PageRank. (If we all decide to let it stay this way, no new site would ever get reciprocal links 'not too good'.)

If you want to try this approach, SEOChat's PageRank Search is a useful free search tool to use. It gives you Google search results PLUS their PageRank. You type in a key phrase and can quickly see the PageRank of pages optimized for that phrase.


Really serious ways of getting links

There are more serious ways to get links. You can arrange newsletter article exchanges with other newsletter publishers in your niche, preferably with newsletters which are archived online. Some webmasters also arrange "article swaps". You write an article to be published on their website and they write an article for your site. This gives you an in-context link, which is much more effective than a mere link on a links page.


Reciprocal links websites

You can also search Google for link exchange websites which publish directories of website owners, who actively exchange links with each other. As a general rule, the easier and more automated link exchanging is, the more risky it is that you'll be doing something which the search engines don't like. For example, you don't want to get involved in link farms which link to totally unrelated websites.

Three ways to save time

1. You can hire companies which specialize in finding reciprocal links partners for you and help you with the work load. You can check out Chris Chong's Backlink Ranking.this is one person full of experience in SEO. Prices vary in different industries. Better still you can have a step by step tutorial guide of Duncan carver's Ultimate Link Building Dossier

2. Use the free SiteSell Value Exchange. It's a very simple, fast, efficient way of exchanging links with relevant sites.

The Value Exchange is useful but its not likely to find you all the reciprocal links partners you need. In some industries, it may find you only a small number of link partners. In others, it may find you several hundred links partners. It's definitely worth joining - especially so because it's free!

Join the free SiteSell Value Exchange - FREE

While you're there, make sure you download the free Make Your Links Work report. It discusses sound, long-term linking strategies.

3. Arelis link exchange software takes a lot of tedium out of finding reciprocal links partners. For example, it has a great "Find Competitor Links" feature that allows you to quickly find all web sites that link to your competitors.

You can also use the free Automate Link Exchanges software.

As we mentioned earlier, web sites that link to your competitors are sites that should link to you too. Arelis quickly locates these sites and helps you to contact them and ask them to link to your site.
If they're already linking to similar sites, there's a good chance they'll be willing to link to you.

You can also search for reciprocal links partners by keyword or keyword phrase.

Arelis makes link management very simple and saves you a lot of time. It also builds your link pages for you. You can customize the template to match your site's style and no one will ever know you're using a link management program.


Warning about SBI and Arelis


Here's a warning from a Site Build It user who also uses Arelis.


"If you upload pages created by Arelis (or any other pages for that matter) to SBI, the links to external sites are replaced by redirected links, presumably for tracking.

"What that does however is that it prevents you from passing any PageRank to your link partners. Putting aside the debate whether PageRank is important or not, many webmasters clearly believe it is important and simply refuse reciprocating with sites that don't link to them is straight HTML. Certainly that has been my experience.

"...the only way around this is to create all reciprocal links in SBI by hand and forget about uploading pages from Arelis or any other reciprocal management software."

SBI users can still use Arelis for a very powerful purpose - to find potential link partners - and can add the links to their sites manually.


Arelis checks your links

Another importance of Arelis is that it checks to see that your reciprocal links partners are still linking to you - another useful time-saver.

There's a free trial version. Highly recommended.

Download the free Arelis trial


Automate Link Exchange

I haven't tried this link management software, but it's getting some very favorable reviews. It could be worth checking out.