Reciprocal Links Aren't Dead - Stop Believing This Crap!

Reciprocal Linking is a topic that I have been meaning to write about for a long time but never have for one reason or another.

One of my favorite bloggers, Courtney Tuttle, posted on the subject of exchanging links in a recent post, Building Authority With Blogroll/Sitewide Link Exchange.

So I figured this is the perfect time for me to put in my thoughts about reciprocal linking and confirm what Court discussed in his post.

Just about everywhere you read these days you will find the "experts" saying that reciprocal linking (exchanging links) is dead. I am here to tell you that is NOT true!

Sure it might not be as effective as it once was but that doesn't mean it's dead and doesn't work at all anymore.

Think about it, when you exchange links you are still getting an inbound link from another website and search engines do like inbound links. It's not as good as a site simply linking to you without a reciprocal link, but it's better than nothing.

I know this for a fact because I have built very high search engine rankings for many of my websites and blogs, and a large part of how that happened was through reciprocal linking.

Plus, high search engine rankings are not the only way to get traffic to a website. There is still a little thing called humans who click links on one site to take them to another site. Doing link exchanges with other sites gives you a link on their site that people can click on to visit your site.

Now don't go reciprocal linking with any site that will accept your link exchange request. That method certainly does not work anymore! If you want to use reciprocal linking to your advantage then you must only exchange links with quality sites that are somewhat related to yours.

What does that last paragraph mean?

I suppose "quality" is a relative term and will be seen differently in each individual. However, you can usually tell a quality site fairly easily. Does it provide any useful content? Is it loaded with ads and not much substance? Is it ranked in search engines? Does it have any PR? Are they spammy? What kinds of sites do they link to? Etc... Look at these factors and you will be able to determine how quality a site is.

As for "related" that is very easy to define. Basically that just means that you don't want to be exchanging links with sites that have nothing to do with the topic of your site. If your site teaches people how to make money online then you don't want to do link exchanges with sites about dog training. They have nothing to do with each other. Instead, you will want to exchange links with sites about home business, working at home, internet income, making money, and others similar to these topics.

One more thing you want to be sure of when reciprocal linking is that your links have a good anchor text on them. Again if your site is about making money online then you want that for your anchor text instead of your name or simply the URL of your home page. For example, my home page is http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com and my site is about home business so I would want my reciprocal link on their site to look like this - home business. Doing so will help you improve your search engine rankings for your keywords and will also tell any potential visitor what your site is about.

Before I end, I want to send you to another post on one of my favorite internet marketing blogs. It is also about link building. It's not actually about doing direct reciprocal linking but something similar with a different twist. Here you go: Link Building - Leveraging Pre-Existing Sites to Build Authority

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Owner of Free Home Business Tips

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