Reciprocal
Links
You may have seen
services (including search engines that are supposed to abhor this sort
of thing) - promoting automatic submission to thousands of sites, directories
and other search engines to get you thousands of links.
The apparent benefit
being that the high link count will boost your ratings on the search
engines, and also you will get endless crowds traffic coming to your
web site. If you are an enthusiast for these tricks then here is the
one that has the highest claims we have encountered: 80million.
The downside is
that the well known search engines dislike, penalise or outwit these
mass submission tools. The bulk of the sites with which these links
are made, are "Free For All" link sites established for this
purpose. The only human visitors that visit these link pages are other
web masters doing the same as you. Even then, because these sites rotate
the links, you would have to submit repeatedly, and every time get emails
back offering "get rich quick schemes." Avoid them like the
plague.
A more contructive
way of building your link count and bringing in traffic is to approach
web sites that have a fit with yours, and ask to establish reciprocal
links. Clearly you have to be smart in this, as you dont want to lose
all your traffic to others, if you dont get good traffic back. Look
for sites that do not compete, but could share the same traffic. e.g.:
a website for a small bridal shop might want to exchange links with
a flower shop, a car hire company or a local hotel. If you find you
have a lot of foreign traffic that you cannot supply, you might want
to link with some overseas sites that could send you their foreign traffic.
You will have to work the search engines
to identify suitable sites to link with.
A more cunning approach
is to check up on your competitors. See our section on competitor
research.
Other websites could
establish one way links - to encourage this behaviour, you need a good
website with useful information. On that note, if you would like to
link to this web site, please do.
