For anyone new to internet marketing, reciprocal linking is an important component of search engine optimisation.

It's simply a method where you place a link on your site to another webmaster's site, and they return the compliment by placing a link on their site to yours. Traditionally, that is why you see "links pages" on a lot of web sites. It's the page where Webmasters place their outbound links to the other sites, usually in return for a link back.

Initially it can be a hard to find partners who are willing to reciprocate links with your site. Its essentially the chicken and the egg problem.

For example, another site that has decent page rank will usually not be interested in trading links with you, because your new site will have zero page rank and therefore not add any juice to their rankings!

So basically you need to have inbound links to attract inbound links!

I therefore tend to concentrate on requesting links from related sites that have a low Page Rank to start off with, usually three or less, until I have at least a page rank of 3 myself.

I leave higher ranking sites alone to begin with until my own pages start to get decent page rank of their own.

So how exactly do you go about finding link exchange partners?

The simplest way is to start with Google. Type in one of your keyword phrases together with the words "add url" or "add link". The results returned by Google will list sites in your niche that are looking to swap links.

The returned pages will show you what you need to do to get your link on their sites. Usually it's as easy as adding your site details to the fields on the returned page, and then copying and pasting their hyperlink code to your own links page.

When you publish your own "link" page so that you can display links from other sites, you need to add more that just links to your new page.

I suggest you do the following: Add some relevant content to the page as as well as just links to make the page more attractive to the Search Engines. Don't call it Links Page, call it "sites of interest" or something similar; Ensure it links directly to your homepage; Split the site links into sections with good Keyword headings and description; Finally, get some inbound links to it!

Why effectively optimise your "links page"?

Well if you do, your "links" page will earn a decent Page Rank, rank well and get traffic. If it does, you will soon have other webmasters contacting you to have their link placed on your links page! Not only that, if your links page gets a decent page rank, you'll attract higher page rank link partners to exchange with, boosting your rankings further!

Next, do what the sites returned in your Google results are doing. Place an "Add URL" page on your website and make it easy for other webmasters to exchange links with you! Again, add lots of keyword rich text to the page to help it in the rankings so that webmasters find it!

Ensure "Add Url" appears in the page title, page heading and in the body of the page along you're your keywords. Also, use "Add Url" as the anchor text for the links to the page.

Finding reciprocal linking partners doesn't have to be hard work, and it can be fruitful, particularly over the longer term. As you find partners and they find you, your inbound links will grow naturally over time.