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The Right Way to Use Reciprocal Links

People who want to increase attention to their websites from the major search engines will often tell you that it is a bad idea to use reciprocal links to get web traffic. They insist that it’s far better to get one-way links because this increases your search engine rankings. While there is some validity to this belief, it should also be known that reciprocal links can be a valuable tool for gaining solid targeted web traffic which can sometimes be more important to the overall value of your site than merely getting the right ranking will be. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with reciprocal links and there can be a lot right about them. You just have to know the right way to use reciprocal linking on your site.

The key thing to know about reciprocal linking is that it serves the primary benefit of driving very specific targeted traffic to your site. This means that it is only useful when the sites that you exchange links with are sites that are followed by people who are going to be truly interested in the content that you have to offer. In other words, there is no point in exchanging links with a carpet cleaning website if you’re in the credit cards business; these two topics are unrelated so the traffic coming from that site wouldn’t likely benefit your site in anyway. This means that the hit you’d take on search engine rankings because of the reciprocal link wouldn’t be worth it. However, reciprocal links with other high-quality websites in the credit cards and personal finance industry would be worth that minor potential hit to your rankings because they’d drive relevant traffic to your site.

Although you do want to be looking for links in your same industry, you want to be careful not to exchange links with sites that are in direct competition with you. Reciprocal links allow people to pursue their interest between a site which means that the site you link to could take away your business if it’s a direct competitor. Instead, you want to choose to link with sites that are complimentary to yours. For example, if you sell credit card offers then you wouldn’t want to link to other sites that do the same thing but instead may want to exchange reciprocal links with money blogs and sites that offer other credit tools.

Finally, make sure that you set up some ground rules for exchanging reciprocal links with other sites. Only exchange links with sites that are picky about who they link to, sites that are credible in their industries and sites that will put your link in a visible spot on the site. With these rules in mind, you can approach other sites with a request for reciprocal link exchange by clearly explaining why you believe that this type of linking could be a benefit to you both.