Simon Paul Thurston

Reciprocal links are a form of links where you place your link to another person’s site, so that in return they place a link of their site that leads to your site. This is a very important part of search engine optimization and is usually placed in the links page of a website.

At first, you may find it difficult to first find some partners to reciprocate links with your site. So I will give you a tip, or rather a secret; you have to have inbound links if you wish to attract inbound links!

This is why I suggest that you try to get links from sites having a low page Rank till you reach a page rank of at least 3. It is better to try out the higher ranking sites only after your page gets a decent page rank.

Tips to find link exchange partners

Google is the best place to look for link exchanges. You have to type one keyword phrase with ‘add url’ or ‘add link’. This will give you lists of sites in your niche looking for swap links where you will find the required information to place your link on their sites.

This is usually an easy job. All you have to do is to furnish details about your site on the required fields on the page they provide you. This done, you will have to copy and paste their hyperlink code to your links page.

I suggest you place more than links to your page on the ‘links’ page like content to the page so that the page is more attractive to search engines. Don’t refer to this page as a links page; instead, refer to it as ‘sites of interest’ or some other interesting title.

Make sure that this page links to your home page and also ensure that you divide links into sections having good keyword headings and descriptions. With this done, you will have some great inbound links leading to your site.

The reason you have to optimize your links page

Remember that the link page is the page that will generate links to your site; so it is only by optimizing it will you get a decent page rank, a good ranking and in return, traffic. This will in turn lead to more and more webmasters contacting you to have their links placed on your links page.

In addition to this, with a decent page ranking, you will be able to attract partner with high page ranking for link exchange, and in turn improve your rankings. I then suggest that you place an ‘add URL’ page to your website so that it is easier for other webmasters to exchange links with you.

Don’t forget to add lots of keyword rich text to this page so that you improve page rankings and make it easy for webmasters to find. ‘Add URL’ has to be displayed in the page heading, page title, body of the page with your other keywords and in anchor text for links to the page.

This done, over a period of time, you are sure to receive quite a few reciprocal linking partners who will help in improving inbound links to your site.

So till we meet, keep building on your link partners……..