Reciprocal Links
Once we have completed the previous steps and worked out our best target markets and products we will start reciprocal linking.
This is your first “off page” Search Engine Optimisation strategy.
It brings in some initial traffic and starts to build your sites reputation with the search engines.
Reciprocal links are when you place a link from your site to a partner’s site. They supply a link back to you in return.
You must be careful who you select to link with. There has, over the years, been some abuse of this SEO technique. Google is very aware of this and is looking for you to link with related or complimentary sites.
The best way to find suitable sites is a simple as doing a Google search on the keywords you wish to rank for. You can then request links from those sites that appear on the top two pages including, surprisingly, your competitors! Then you can drill into these sites and hunt for their link partners page. You can then request links from all those linking websites. This can then be repeated.
I have bought a couple of pieces of software that automate this research which saves a huge amount of time. If you sign up with me you get access to all the benefits of it.
How do you actually make the link request?
Here is the best strategy for link requests.
You must be organised and disciplined for this to work. First you place a link to your prospective link partner on your page. Then send an e-mail (or written letter, slower but higher success rate) to your prospective partner. There is a science to how you actually form that e-mail because there some of the spam filters are now able to pull out link requests. You must make it easy for your prospect to place the link on their site. You should write good quality text to go with your link.
To start with you will use a link to your homepage, as time goes on you will start to reciprocate with deep links into your selected landing page.
You must however, check back to make sure your link has been placed. If not you must remove the link from your site.
Is your link partners Google PageRank important
Some people will advise that your prospective linking partners must have a high Google PageRank (the little green bar on the Google toolbar). I caution against the simplicity of this. More important, in my experience, is how relevant the partner site is and where your link will be placed. A link back to your site from a page, 1 level away from the homepage with 20 other links on it is better than a link 5 levels down from a page with 200 other links, regardless of the official PageRank.
A good explanation of this is a concept you will hear about this subject referred to as “link juice”. It explains the amount of authority each link bestows on its destination page. Each site carries a certain amount of “link juice”. It flows from page to page and then off site to linking partners. Its effect to you is related to how much of another site’s link juice you can attract. If you get a link from their homepage which only had 1 other off-site link, you will get a huge amount of that sites link juice. As described above if you are in a lower page level and you share with many other off-site links, you gain much less benefit. Think of it as a sieve, how much liquid travels through each hole, related to the number and size of holes!
Where possible pick sites with a high level resources or links page, and set your link page an extra level deeper.
There is software available to manage your link requests, however in my experience there is no substitute to a personal e-mail, telephone call or letter.