Reciprocal links - Who / How to target
By David Callan
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 have 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 you visitors
and
which complement you site, not compete with it. Sending visitors
to a competing site with a similar product is a big mistake
because chances are they'll buy your their product.
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
sites. 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 altavista.com or any other engine which will
tell me which sites link to which.
Say for example you knew your competition was WWW.XZY.COM,
you
would go to altavista and type in link:competition.com (leaving
out the http://www. part). So to follow the above format you
would type in link:xyz.com and do the search, altavista would
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 are 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 will 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. However it's well worth it because
you
are effectively taking visitors away from your competitors
site
by having you 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.
So 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. For example if I was
doing this I wouldn't enter 'Internet marketing articles'
because
chances are most results would be competitive sites, I would
enter in 'Internet marketing' because it's a wide area but
still
which is 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 - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for free internet marketing articles, advice,
ebooks, news and lots more.
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