Building website traffic through the use of links is one of the oldest ways of marketing your website.  It used to be relatively easy to get these links to come in your website and people would gladly exchange links for a variety of different reasons.  First, they loved to get the direct traffic they came from links because the people were already interested in what they were talking about.  Secondly, it gave them a healthy boost to the search engine rankings and it is still possible to do so today.  The problem is, many of the search engines are now starting to ignore reciprocal links to a certain extent.  Search engine rankings that were once built on these exchanged links now seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.  Does that mean that exchanging links is dead?

Many people still exchange links on a regular basis and they do so with a lot of success.  Although the old reciprocal link directories may not work quite as well as they used to, if you’re able to exchange links in the proper way you can still get a lot of traffic to your website in a short period of time.  The real key comes in finding link partners and not simply looking for a massive amount of links.  These link partners are out there and they are willing to exchange links with you if you sweeten the pot to a certain extent.  Here is one way that you can do that.

If you have a popular website or blog that gets a lot of repeat traffic, you can display how many links you are sending to them by simply adding a link to their website on your blog.  Put in a prominent location and let it sit there for a week or two, getting people to click over to it on a regular basis.  Use a script to keep track of how many people are clicking on that link and then e-mail them that information after a week or two has expired.  If they are getting 10 or 20 clicks a day or more from you, they would be more willing to add a link to your website in return.  The hardest part about doing this is waiting for the initial period to end but getting a decent link from another website will make it all worth the effort.

Of course, you don’t need to stick with exchanging links in order to get some inbound traffic.  You can get incoming links in a variety of different ways such as article writing, leaving comments on other blogs and forum marketing.  As long as you do these things properly, you would be surprised with the amount of traffic that will come your way.  Reciprocal links still have their place and they will probably always work to a certain extent.  Make sure that you make them a part of your marketing effort and you will be happy that you’ve done so.

Having incoming links to your website is the single most powerful way to gain recognition in the eyes of the search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.  The types of links that you have pointing at your website, however, will make a large difference in the type of attention and recognition that you get from the search engines.  Things that worked a few years ago are not necessarily the things that work well now.  In order to stay on top of the search engine result pages, you need to stay on top of what the search engines require.

Several years ago, it was a fairly easy thing to get to the top of the search engine result pages, or SERPS by launching a massive reciprocal linking campaign.  You simply sent out massive amounts of e-mail to webmasters offering a link to their website in exchange for a link back to your own.  As a matter of fact, it really didn’t even matter what kind of website you were acquiring the links from, as long as the link pointed towards you.  Google was counting all of these links as being beneficial and pointing to the fact that your website was an authority on your particular subject.

Once the word was out, so to speak, some people over used this method to the point where Google eventually stopped counting reciprocal links as being all important as far as ranking your website.  As a matter of fact, too much reciprocal linking may have even been an indicator that your website was participating in something that they disagree with.  Overnight, people lost their position in the SERPS as a result of this change in the Google algorithm.  Does that mean, however, that all reciprocal linking is bad?

Reciprocal linking can still be a very important part of your search engine optimization plan.  What you don’t want to do, however, is to rely entirely on this form of linking.  Google loves links and they probably always will but you need to start developing campaigns that will result in one way links into your website from authority websites within your same niche.  Links from off-topic websites and reciprocal linking will still continue to give you some weight but the all powerful one way link is what will launch your website to the top of the results.

Even though reciprocal linking may be close to dying, it is still an easy way to gain a little bit of recognition.  There are still plenty of scripts out there which make reciprocal linking an automated process and if used properly, can make a difference in your rankings.  As of right now, Yahoo and MSN still give credit to these reciprocal links and Google still credits them to a certain extent.  Until they are totally dead, it will always be a good idea to include them in your marketing efforts as they may make the difference between you being number two on the listings or number one.

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Guido Nussbaum