Reciprocal Links - How important are they
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 site, and that sites webmaster returns the favour and links back
to your site. For some reason or another you always receive a lot
more traffic from sites, then you give out.
This method of traffic building is very important and its free, its
simply a matter of contacting the right webmasters and getting the
right links. However a full blown 'link-hunt' 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 have a much better chance of selling them your product or
service, because they have come to your site through a link on a
related website you know they are 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. So these are prime prospects for your product or service
and best of all you don't have to pay for a single one.
Also it is worth telling you that it is very unlikely that once a
link is up on someone's site that it will be taken down. This means
that once a link is up, chances are it will be sending you free
visitors for its lifetime, free visitors = free sales = 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.
Also 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. Also this method of using the number of links as a
relevancy factor helps the search engines defeat gateway/doorway
pages. Why would anyone link to 'bare-bones' keyword filled doorway
page? - Simple answer - they wouldn't. And the search engines know
this.
Google is the most prominent of the big boys to use this method, and
it has brought me a lot of visitors to my hobby site. Hobby site? you
may ask. Well you may be interested to read that I am also the
webmaster of www.irishboxingnews.com and have been for 2+ years.
The last time I checked on Altavista I had 169 sites linking to Irish
Boxing News.com, and I am ranked number 3 on Google for the search
term 'boxing news' . I get about 25 - 40 visitors a day from Google
for this search term alone.
Before Google introduced the number of links to a site as a relevancy
factor I wasn't even in the top 20, now however because I have so
many quality sites linking to Irish Boxing News.com the googlebot
feels I deserve position 3.
More search engines are likely to come around to this method of
ranking as Google has shown with its tremendous growth that its a
very effective method of establishing relevancy.
So hopefully you can see why reciprocal linking is so important to
any 'serious' webmasters. My Irish Boxing News.com site gets about
150 visitors a day, not bad for a site without a budget plus it's a
niche information site, and doesn't have broad appeal, anyway most of
them come from search engines but about 50-60 come from links on
other sites. Just Multiply them numbers by 4 or 5 for a site with
mass appeal like an Internet Marketing site and you can really start
to see the power of developing links with other sites.
BOTTOM LINE - GET LINKING NOW
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.
