Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is a powerful, but often overlooked way to generate traffic - not just from your link partners but also from the search engines.

You're probably already familiar with reciprocal links, but here is a brief definition:

A reciprocal link is a link swap between two web sites. You place your link partner's link on your web site, and in return they place your link on their web site.

Who Should You Partner Up With?

Some link traders are fixated on exchanging links with high traffic sites.

High traffic sites are great, but you should always consider a link exchange with a site that offers high-quality and complementary content, no matter how much traffic they receive. You should focus on targeting rather than numbers.

The more highly targeted your link partner, the more likely their visitors are to click on your link and visit your site. Also, there is a synergy that develops between link partners. If you're a better marketer than your link partner, your traffic boost can affect their search engine rankings. You can boost them higher, and this means that both sites' traffic will increase symbiotically.

The Search Ranking Connection

Reciprocal links can boost your ranking in the search engines. How?

Remember that the engines rely on keywords to determine relevance. When you optimize your links to include your keywords, you effectively increase the frequency with which your site registers on those keywords.

The way this works is somewhat complicated. The most you need to know is that popular engines like Google base their results on a recommendation model. Sites are clustered together not just by the keywords in their meta tags and content, but also by their relationship to each other.

In Google's eyes, sites which point to each other make up a type of "mini-net" or "authoritative hub" for the keywords in question. You might get a better grasp on this by visualizing a group of sites strung together like a small spider's web being pulled up in ranking as a group, rather than individually.

Finding Link Partners

Finding link partners takes a little bit of work, but it's worth it. Most of your effort goes towards evaluating each potential partner and the relevance of their content.

If you want to search manually, all you need to do is use a standard search or directory search on your favorite engine. I recommend using Google for two features it boasts which come in handy for finding partner sites: the 'backwards links' feature and 'show similar sites' feature.

The backwards links data will show you who else links to your target site.

This is a good way to collect extra sites which might be relevant to yours and worth pursuing a link exchange with. The "show similar links" feature gives you a listing of sites which may or not link to your target site, but which Google believes to be similar in content and keyword relevance.

If you want to automate your search, there are numerous software solutions available. Some of the most popular ones include Zeus, Arelis and Linkalizer.

These tools collect vast amounts of information by following site links he same way search engine spiders do. You enter the URL of the site that you think is an ideal link partner and the software crawls that site in search of outbound links to reciprocal link partners. It also retrieves additional helpful data such as the webmaster's contact address and the URL of the link submission page if one is available.

Tying It All Together

When it comes to reciprocal linking, more isn't necessarily better.

At least 20 to 30 good links will improve your ranking and your traffic dramatically. If you want to rely on reciprocal linking to generate the bulk of your traffic, you trade as many links as you want – but be forewarned, too many links can negatively affect your search engine ranking.

Large portals like Yahoo! and CNN benefit from having thousands of links simply because the sites are so general the relevance factor is ambiguous.

A small business niche site, however, can't possibly be relevant to thousands of other sites. Focus your links on relevant, high-quality sites and don't worry about gathering up a massive list of reciprocal links.