Search engines are using links to decide relevance of your site's content to the keywords you provide. Reciprocal links provide better website popularity and higher page ranking with search engines, which help drive free traffic to your site. This is why your website needs reciprocal links to help pull in quality traffic. But these have to be high quality, relevant to your website's content links.



This article will explore an aspect of effective link exchange with other site owners and hopefully, increase your website's chances to establish reciprocal links with sites that have higher page rank and greater traffic.

To better chances of your website acceptance by other webmasters for reciprocal linking consider the following suggestions:

First you should put yourself on the place of a web master/web mistress of the site you want to exchange links with. Ask yourself: “Would I link to my website?” This may save you some time, and help you decide what websites you want to exchange links with.

To get quality targeted traffic try to strive for a quality, themed based website. Find a niche and stay with it. Single topic focused websites tend to do better when it comes to exchanging links.

You can create a directory with subdirectories on your site where links to other sites will be found. Better yet, if an outbound link is located within the context relevant to linked site.

As there are some DOs to follow when trying to establish reciprocal links, there are certain DON'Ts as well. If your website fits any of the below categories you may consider improving all the weak spots your website has. Some DON'Ts include:

• Poorly designed websites. Website quickly thrown together is easy to detect. Your website doesn't have to be fancy, but having a clean and spelling error free site helps.

• Websites with little content or low quality content.

• Sites with too many low value links. Links considered low value if they lead to low content or junk sites, banner/link farms etc.

• Don't place more than 20 links per page. High amount of links per any page will reduce the chances of visitors going to any one particular site, and most likely, your link partners will not like it.

• Sites with lots of dead links. Links leading to pages under construction, pages that can not be found, etc. are not looked upon favorably.

• Dead sites. Dead sites are sites under construction, or sites inaccessible for any other reason.

• Sites supporting terrorism, illegal activities, hate, promoting spam, or racial intolerance.