Who / How to target for reciprocal links
Reciprocal linking is one of the most effective ways of driving targeted mass numbers of people to your website, however in order to be successful you’ve to carefully target and choose the sites you want to link with.
What you need to be doing is focusing on linking to similar high-traffic quality sites which will interest your visitors and which complement your site, not compete with it. Sending visitors to a competing site with a similar product is a big mistake because the chances are good that they’ll buy your their product and not yours.
Try not to down-link which is what I call it when a site links with a site with far less traffic than it. Always aim to up-link with a few high traffic sites rather than a bunch of low traffic ones. The results are much better.
My favorite and first thing to do when looking for sites to target is to try a take traffic away from my competition. I do this by visiting http://www.altavista.com or any other search engine which will tell me which sites link to which.
Imagine for example you knew your competition was www.xyz.com. You would go to Altavista and type in link:competition.com leaving out the http://www. part. To follow the above format you’d type in link:xyz.com and do the search, Altavista will return all the sites in its database that link to www.xyz.com.These are the first few sites you want to link to because you know they’re sending traffic and business to your competition and you want a piece of action too. Chances are if these sites link to your competitor they’ll link to you too.
Depending on the industry of your business and your competitor, he or she could have hundreds of links so be prepared to be held up for quite some time. It’s well worth it however because you’re effectively taking visitors away from your competitors site by having your link wherever their link is.
The next way you can target sites to link with is by visiting one of the major search sites, either Yahoo.com or Google.com. The advantage these two sites have over other search sites when it comes to targeting links is that usually results from these are of a very high standard. In Yahoo.com’s case it’s because all sites are reviewed by a human editor and in Google.com’s case it’s because they use link popularity as one of the main factors of relevancy when returning results from a search meaning only good quality sites are returned.
You’re on either Google.com or Yahoo.com, now enter keywords and keyphrases which relate to the theme of your website, remember you don’t want to link to competitive sites so try not to be too specific on your search term. If I was doing this I wouldn’t enter ‘Internet marketing articles’ because chances are most results would be competitive sites, I’d enter in ‘Internet marketing’ because it’s a wide area but still related to my website theme and not necessarily competing with me. The sites that show up for these results are prime targets. Ask for links with these guys, next you can target the guys who have links to them. The possibilities are endless.
Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of AKA Marketing.com webmaster forums. Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics
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Why It’s Best Avoid Reciprocal Linking These Days
Reciprocal linking is a kind of ’symbiotic relationship’ between two complementary websites. Each site has a hyperlink pointing to the other. The idea behind this is to elevate the awareness of the search engines’ to the existence of both websites’. In Google’s case, a lot of reciprocal linking could boost a site’s page rank. Even better, reciprocal linking could raise the position of that website in Google’s listings under specific keywords or phrases.
This method of website promotion worked very well, until the people behind main search engines decided that it was better for those doing a search that the search results would no longer place emphasis on reciprocally linked websites.
If you think about this carefully, it is not surprising. Why should websites that blatantly try to hoodwink the search engines get the most exposure? Just because those sites have, say, thousands of reciprocal links to other sites, does not mean that those sites are the best sites for those doing a search to be directed to.
This is probably one reason why search engines have recently changed their algorithms. Now, if a website has a one-way link coming ‘to it’ from another website, which is not reciprocated, the search engines will look favorably at that site because the linking site is saying: ‘Hey, spider! Look at this website - I totally endorse it!’
Does this mean that the person doing a search will be directed to the best top 10 sites on the web under a chosen keyword or phrase now that reciprocal linking is being ignored? It should, but the search engines may still be being hoodwinked.
Why?
Because the owner of a decent, high page rank website, might be offering a one-way link to an ‘unworthy site’ for financial gain. This means that the lesser website may appear high in the listings even though that site’s contents are not what those doing a search are looking for.
How widespread this misleading activity is remains a moot point, but the ability for unscrupulous website owners to deceive those doing a search must give the people behind the search engines cause for concern.
One day, perhaps, any form of linking may be ignored. This will help the listings to be free of malpractice and the top sites displayed will be those that finally offer real, genuine, RSS-free, relevant content. And if that content is regularly updated, so much the better.
About the author:
Victor George is a “fresh, relevant content” crusader whose web site can be found at: autopageupdate.com Other articles by Victor George can be found at: VGS Publishing