Use A Reciprocal Link Exchange To Boost Your Page Rank

There are a few ways to build back links to your website but the one I will focus on today is the use of reciprocal links.

A reciprocal link exchange is when you place a link to your website on another website and in exchange they will place a link to their website on yours. Most webmasters consider one-way links to be more effective because it doesn't require permission to place a link to your website on that particular page. One-way links can be achieved by writing and submitting content rich articles, submitting to link directories, posting in forums and blogging. However, if you are a newbie to the Internet marketing world and you lack the skills to write informative articles or post in blogs, a reciprocal link exchange can be an effective way to help you get your website on the map and increase your ranking in the search engines.

Search engines today are a lot smarter than they were in the old days. Back then if you had a ton of reciprocal links and you linked to every website imaginable, your website would be at the top of the search engines guaranteed. Now that search engines are more particular about how they rank websites they want to see quality, relevant back links.

So, how do you get quality, relevant back links by reciprocal linking? In Brad Callens, eBook "Search Engine Optimization Made Easy" He lists a criteria that will allow to you analyze websites and there content. When you analyze a website to link to this is what he says to look for:


Which websites link to them
The number of websites linking to them
The Google page rank of the website linking to them
The page title of the website linking to them
The anchor text used in the link linking to them
The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to them
The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to them
The total number of links on the website that is linking to them
Whether or not the websites linking to them are deemed by Google as an authority website

The IP Address of the websites linking to them.
Now looking at this list you could say that reciprocal linking can be a time consuming task. If you read Brad Callens' eBook you will see that he promotes a software that does all of the dirty work for you. But it is important to see this list to get an idea on how search engines (in this case, Google) view the content on your website and the links pointing back to your website.

Assuming you have your links page setup and found websites to link to its time to contact the webmasters of these sites. All you want to do is send them an email with all of your website information and request to exchange links with them. I personally use Link Machine software to do this. Here is a sample of an email template that I use:

Subject: Link exchange with your site THEIR URL

Body:

My name is YOUR NAME, and I run the web site YOUR TITLE: YOUR URL

I recently found your site THEIR URL and am very interested in exchanging links. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:

YOUR LINK PAGE

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows:

Title: MY TITLE
URL: MY URL
Description: MY DESCRIPTION

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on, by entering it in this form:

LINK TO PAGE WHERE THEY ENTER THEIR INFO

You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your site, if you'd like.

Thank you very much,

YOUR NAME

If you do not get an immediate response wait a week then send another email. You don't want to pester anyone because it will damage your reputation and annoy the heck out of the webmasters of other websites.

Once you start getting some responses and acquiring some links it is important that you maintain your links page by organizing your links and also to check them once in a while to see if they are still valid. If you keep dead links on your web page that could hurt your rankings in the search engines dramatically. REMOVE THOSE DEAD LINKS IMMEDIATELY!

Remember acquiring quality back links that are relevant to your website is the key to a successful linking campaign of any kind . A reciprocal link exchange is one of those off page optimization techniques that can take a lot of time but if it is done correctly it can produce positive results.


Steve Gitto

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Labels: back links, page rank, reciprocal link exchange