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've 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 your visitors and which complement your site, not compete
with it. Sending visitors to a competing site with a similar product
is a big mistake because the chances are good that they'll buy your
their product and not yours.
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 ones. 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
or any other search engine which will tell me which sites link to
which.
Imagine for example you knew
your competition was www.xyz.com. You would go to Altavista and type
in link:competition.com leaving out the
http://www. part. To follow the above format you'd type in
link:xyz.com and do the search, Altavista will 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're 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'll 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. It's well
worth it however because you're effectively taking visitors away from
your competitors site by having your 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.
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. If I was
doing this I wouldn't enter 'Internet marketing articles' because
chances are most results would be competitive sites, I'd enter in
'Internet marketing' because it's a wide area but still 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.
About The Author
Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional
and webmaster of
. Visit his
webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines,
website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics. |
Who / How
to target for reciprocal links
