Reciprocal links - Cross linking

One of the best ways of getting links is to exchange links with other sites that match your broad theme. Some people often worry about how many visitors they send the linked site against how many visitors the link site sends them. Ideally, reciprocal links should offer an equitable exchange i.e. a similar amount of traffic flowing both ways. You may find it easier to trade links if you are getting a high visitor count, but then again it's not a prerequisite, as the aim is to increase the number of links and most enlightened people are aware of this and as a result are more likely to look at your sites relevancy, presentation and content

The bottom line here is that if you can get a high traffic site to link to you then great, but don't worry about any reasonable disparity in numbers to put you off, if the site compliments yours, get the link!

Building a links page

To effectively have reciprocal links going back to the sites that have agreed to link to your site, you must somehow accommodate these links somewhere on your site. There's no better way of doing this than including a links page on your site. A links page can be a simple affair, containing links to your reciprocal sites home pages, in any kind of order you see fit, alphabetically, in grouped categories or what have you

In order for this link page not to end up growing into an unwelcome blot on your site, it must be thought of as an asset for your visitors i.e. a rich resource of comparable and complimentary sites with respect to yours, after all they are interested in your kind of site so it fits that they are in the mood for similar kinds of information

Another way a links page helps is that it adds another keyword and content rich page to your site

If for example you have a links page with 30 or 40 links to sites that are all relevant to your main topic, insert a description next to the links. This will give you room to add keywords that are relevant to the general theme of your web site. Once again make sure you are linking to pages that are relevant to your topic or theme, you don't want to dilute your theme with a lot of non-relevant material

Unilateral links

How do you get people to want to link to your site, especially without requesting a reciprocal link? Well for a start good content gets free links, poor content and product only sites usually do not. You shouldn't expect people to link to your site unless they have a reason to do so. Several compelling reasons to link to your site could be: -

Authority of creator
Depth of non-sales content
Association with quality, branded company

The same thing attracts links that attracts visitors, good quality content. What ever kind of site you have continually strive to improve its content

Link building tips

Aim to have more links to your site than similar web sites in your sector have pointing to them
Ensure you're in DMOZ and Yahoo! They will work wonders for link popularity
Spend an hour or two a week on your link building campaign for maximum effect
Link popularity is specific to a page, rather than a site, so when asking for a link ask them to link to your homepage to focus your efforts, otherwise you may be diluting your efforts
Write articles for related industry sites, include your URL in the signature. Participate in online forums that allow you to include signature files. Sign guestbooks of quality related sites
If your thinking of linking several of your own sites together, then they should be hosted on different servers. Search engines look at linked sites with the same or similar I.P. address and either reduce the links weighting or disregard it. Also only think about linking together your own sites together if there is a strong relevant theme between them

Link context analysis

Some search engines take the context of a link into consideration. Examining the text near the link to determine the relevance of the page being linked to, e.g. if a link said "Discount Personal Computers" and pointed toward IBM, then search engines using link-text analysis would already know that IBM is relevant for the words "Personal Computers", thus making it a relevant link

Summary

At least 50% of the top ten search engines factor links to your site in their relevancy algorithms
Don't participate in any so called "Link Popularity Exchanges" (Link Farms) and be wary of Free For All Link Pages (FFA)
One good link can send you more traffic than the biggest search engine
It's important to have at least one external link pointing to your site, as some engines will refuse to index your site if you have no inbound links (e.g. Google), while other engines may drop your listing after a week or two (e.g. HotBot)
A link popularity building campaign is an on going process. Once you have started you really should budget for an hour or two a week and split your time between finding complimentary sites to forge links with and actually contacting them and discussing the possibility of reciprocal links

Want to save time? A good tool for automating your link building campaign is Zeus, the automatic link building robot. This software can do all the hard work for you. It visits sites that match your sites theme and builds a database of likely link candidates, capturing their e-mail address and even sending out pre-formatted e-mail requests for a link. It'll even work throughout the night if you want it to. Think of the number of links you could get in a month or two! Zeus, the automatic link building robot

search engine submission

Reciprocal links - Cross linking

Building a links page

Unilateral links

More link popularity benefits

Link building tips

Link context analysis