Choosing your Reciprocal Link Partners

Reciprocal links have been a core of World Wide Web activity since its beginning. This is really the backbone of the WWW – while visiting one website you click on a link and end up on another website and you then click on another link and so on.

A current trend, in an attempt to rank higher on search engines, is to gather hundreds or thousands of reciprocal links. This can have a potentially negative impact. Ultimately you want to decide if it is worthwhile to make the effort to create a reciprocal link with each company. Here are a few guidelines: (adapted from an article by Donald Nelson, “How to Choose Your Link Partners” - www.a1-optimization.com)
1. Drawing More Traffic To Your Website
When you are reviewing the site of a potential link partner, take a look at how that site displays the links. Is the links page visible, and linked to the other pages of the website?
If the links are haphazardly arranged - 200 links on one hard-to-find page with no apparent order - your chances of getting traffic is also reduced. Will your link be buried in a huge directory, many layers removed from the main pages of the site? Look at the possible placement of your link, and judge it from the standpoint of visibility and its capacity to generate traffic to your site.
2. Add Value To Your Website
Your website is valuable to your visitors if it provides information that they need. The articles, products and other content that you publish is your first source of material for satisfying the needs of your visitors, but the links you provide can also make your site an important source of information and a convenient place for people to visit and revisit. Choose your links from the standpoint of satisfying the needs of your clientele.
3. Build Link Popularity and Boost Ranking in Search Engine Results
Search engine results are determined by the material you have presented on your web page, and by other off-page factors, such as, how many other sites link to your site. The concept of link popularity got a huge boost from Google whose PageRank system not only weighs the number of links that point to your site, but also the quality of those incoming links.
At the end of the day, you want your site to provide valuable content and service to your customers. Reciprocal links, if done correctly, are certainly a way to accomplish this.

-Doug DeVries
www.Equine-Design.com 
doug@equine-design.com