How Important are Reciprocal Links?

Joelene Wickens-Orlando

July 17th, 2003

This method is second to search engines as a way to get traffic to your site. Here’s the kicker on reciprocal links and search engines, and how one helps the other. Reciprocal linking helps improve your search engine placement, but in order to gain a better status in the rankings, you have to link. The fact is reciprocal links are just as important, and it’s free. It is simply a matter of contacting the right websites and the right links that makes it beneficial and worth your time.

If you’re not familiar with reciprocal links and how they can help you, here is a tidbit of what reciprocal links are all about. The concept is quite simple. You link to a particular site, and that site returns the favor back to your site. Just by doing that, you receive a lot more traffic from other sites than just having a website alone.

The key thing with reciprocal links is making sure that you contact the right websites, and the links you allow on your websites are related to the products or services you provide, although not in direct competition with your products. Sounds a bit tricky, huh? Don’t get crazy and decide that you want to be on 100 other websites, because it will be time consuming and not to mention, too difficult to track. It’s recommended that you pick maybe 20 or so sites that are highly targeted to your area of expertise. The benefits of having links outweigh the decision not to link, and it’s another form to direct traffic to your website that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

Let’s discuss the benefits of why linking is important and why you should invest a bit of your time to make this part of your marketing strategy. First of all, it’s free for the most part. Try to find sites that will swap links, rather than get on ones that charge anywhere from $5 to $25 for a link. Once your business starts taking off, you might want to consider that option down the road, especially if there are some sites you feel that would be beneficial for your business to pay for links.

Further benefits:

* You have received customers from another site because they found your link on a related website that interested potential customers to click on. Think of linking as “prime prospects” for your product or services. If you don’t link, you have not only lost a potential target of people you can reach, but you are only reaching a much smaller percentage instead.

* Once people link to your site, your site has a chance to improve in the rankings of the search engines. Remember, the better the ranking, or position in the search engines, the more likely people will see your name first. So, link away to better positioning!

* It’s a great form of marketing, and a good way to work on your search engine campaign to increase traffic to your website. The more traffic to your website, more visitors means more profits.

Just keep in mind that many of the search engines are using the number of times that people link to a particular site to determine its relevancy. The idea behind that is, the more people that link on a site, the more valuable it must be. When the search engine sees that it is receiving much traffic, or rather linking, it automatically tells them that people are linking on it, and therefore, it improves the ranking situation of your website. Why not let linking do the job for you, and help get people to your site? The option not to aggressively pursue reciprocal links for your business would be the worst marketing decision you can make for yourself. So, get linking!

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About the Author: Joelene Orlando is a Web enthusiast and a staff writer/consultant for eMarketing Answers with a broad knowledge of topics covering Internet marketing and communication strategies for both consumer and small business owners. http://www.emarketinganswers.com is dedicated to providing free, comprehensive emarketing resources and online promotion tools.