Reciprocal Link Building

A reciprocal link building campaign, sometimes referred to as a link exchange program, is the most common strategy adopted by Internet marketers to increase link popularity. Reciprocal link building is easier and more affordable than one way inbound link building and plays an integral role in improving your site's popularity among search engines.

The process typically involves making a phone call or emailing a request to a webmaster or website owner and offering to exchange text links between party sites. They link to your website and you link to theirs. Simple right? Not necessarily...

Popular search engines like Google create algorithms that assign values to your website's incoming and outgoing links when ranking its relevance for a particular keyword or keyphrase in their search results. The "values" these algorithms assign are derived from a combination of factors ranging from the quantity of your site's inbound and outbound links to the relevance of your site's content in relation to the web pages you link to and from.

Tips for Running a Successful Reciprocal Link Building Campaign

Here are a few tips for running a successful reciprocal link building campaign and increasing your site's popularity with search engines and web users.

  1. Find sites you can relate to.

    Search engines will give your site more credit for linking to and from other websites with similar content.

  2. All inbound links are good links.

    As stated above, some links can help your site's ranking more than others. Although inbound links from unrelated websites will not greatly improve your standing with search engines, every little bit helps.

  3. Linking to questionable sites CAN hurt you.

    While incoming links can only increase your site's ranking, linking to sites that use questionable search engine marketing practices can hurt your reputation with search engines.

  4. Not all links are created equal.

    Search engines can only give you credit for incoming links that their spiders can detect. Links on pages not indexed by search engines or text links written in javascript or redirected through other web pages will not help your ranking.

  5. Stay organized.

    Organization plays a vital role in managing any reciprocal link building campaign. Keep a record of all of your link partnership emails and the URLs where your links should be posted on your partners' sites. Visit the URLs periodically to make sure your links are still up or use a link monitoring tool like LinkAssure's free Reciprocal Link Checker.

    If the thought of link exchange program maintenance doesn't appeal to you, outsource your link campaign management to a third party like LinkAssure.

  6. Work with the professionals.

    These helpful tips for running a successful reciprocal link building campaign reflect only a small portion of the knowledge of the potential gains, pitfalls and strategies required to manage a program of this kind.

    Consider one of our reciprocal link rate plans (page right) and save time and money while avoiding possible harm to your website's reputation, by working with the professionals at LinkAssure.

Start a link building campaign with LinkAssure today!
Call us toll-free at 1-877-748-3367.