How
important are reciprocal links?
How important are reciprocal links?
In my opinion reciprocal links are second only to search engines
as a way to get traffic to ones site.
Reciprocal links are links with other sites which are generally
related to the theme of your website. The concept is simple, you
link to a site and that sites webmaster returns the favor and links
back to your site. For some reason or another you always receive
a lot more traffic from doing link exchanges sites than you give
out.
This method of traffic building is very important and it's free,
it's simply a matter of contacting the right webmasters and getting
the right links. A full blown 'link-hunt' however can be time consuming
but the benefits it can bring are huge. Among them are:
Highly targeted visitors
Better search engine rankings
The visitors that come from related websites are highly targeted
and you've a much better chance of selling them your product or
service Since they've come to your site through a link on a related
website you know they're interested in your sites theme, otherwise
they wouldn't be on a site that is linking to you and furthermore
they definitely wouldn't click through if they weren't interested.
These visitors are prime prospects for your product or service and
best of all you don't have to pay for a single one.
It's worth telling you that it is very unlikely that once a link
is up on someones site that it will be taken down. This means that
once a link is up, chances are it'll be sending you free visitors
for its lifetime, free visitors equals free sales which in turn
equals more profit.
Reciprocal linking is my personal favorite form of marketing even
though a good search engine campaign will bring in much more traffic
than any number of links can. I say this because it's ideal for
sites just starting out as you can see the visitors and sales coming
in within days of contacting webmasters for links, especially if
you can secure any high traffic links.
Apart from getting visitors from the linking site itself more
recently some major search engines are using the number of links
to a site as an important factor in establishing a sites relevancy.
The idea behind this is that the more links a site has to more valuable
it must be.
This method of using the number of links as a relevancy factor
helps the search engines defeat doorway pages. Why would anyone
link to 'bare-bones' keyword filled doorway page? To that question
there's a simple answer, they wouldn't and the search engines know
this.
Google is the most prominent of the big boys to use this method.
It brought me a lot of visitors to my hobby site. Hobby site? You
may ask. Well you may be interested to read that I was the webmaster
of http://www.irishboxingnews.com for three years.
I have recently discontinued http://www.irishboxingnews.com to
concentrate on this site, but I remember checking backward links
on Altavista and Google during its operation. I had 275 sites linking
to Irish Boxing News.com and was ranked number three on Google for
the search term 'boxing news', which is a very popular query. I
got between 40 and 70 visitors a day from Google for this search
term alone.
Before Google introduced the number of links to a site as a ranking
factor with its patented Pagerank system I wasn't even in the top
20, because however I had so many quality sites linking to Irish
Boxing News.com Google felt I deserved position three when the Pagerank
system was put in place.
More search engines are likely to come around to this method of
evaluating sites as Google has shown with its tremendous growth
that it's a very effective method of ranking search results.
Hopefully you can see why reciprocal linking is so important to
any 'serious' webmasters. My Irish Boxing News.com site got about
150 visitors a day through reciprocal links alone, not bad for a
site without a budget plus it was a niche information site and didn't
have broad appeal. Just Multiply 150 by 4 or 5 for a website with
mass appeal like an Internet Marketing themed one and you can really
start to see the power of developing links with other sites. The
bottom line is - get linking now, you'll be glad you did.
About the Author 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.
|
