Relevant Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking has been around as long as the Internet has existed. It’s nothing more than one website operator requesting a hyperlink to a web site from another web site. Relevant Reciprocal Links are a crucial part of any website promotion effort, as they are an important part of what the search engines look for in a web site.

By the time you are ready to start building a links network, or have one built for your website, you will need to have properly executed all the steps outlined in our search engine strategies section. At this point, you will have created great content, and started the search engine optimization process. Now, you want to take advantage of any opportunity to let people know about your website. One of the steps you need to look at is exchanging reciprocal links with other websites. The process of exchanging reciprocal links is a simple one, but there are pitfalls that must be avoided.

What is a reciprocal link?

A reciprocal link is a text and/or banner link to a web site that also has a text or banner link back (in reciprocation) to your own website. A reciprocal link is a reference. The website operator who exhanged links has essentially said that the “website that we linked to is worth looking at.”

Lastly, always remember that just like any other part of an SEO strategy, a reciprocal link is not a quick fix to bring in traffic. It’s only part of a search engine optimization strategy.

Why Build Reciprocal Links?

A properly executed reciprocal links campaign will help ‘push’ a website to the top of the search engine listings for a relevant keyword search. Think about it, the entire goal of a search engine marketing strategy is to attract visitors to a website. One of these steps is to ensure that when potential visitors to your website enter a relevant search phrase into a search engine, the search results page lists a link to your site, hopefully near the top.

By having as many websites as possible linking to your own, you are essentially getting that many recommendations from other web site operators. These recommendations are counted and weighed by the search engines as part of their algorithms.

Lastly, search engine robots navigate the Internet via links, so that by linking, you are helping the search engines build a better Internet. Therefore linking helps your score in the search engines, and helps the search engines find any websites you deem to be of interest.