Selecting the right reciprocal link style, theme, scripts and design for your website reciprocal link section is critical to the success of your reciprocal link advertising campaign. The objective of natural (organic) link exchanges is to provide your visitors with a useful value added service and reciprocate targeted traffic to your link partner websites. There are two basic style options for adding a reciprocal link section on your website

1. Link pages - Pages of topically organized links that provide complimentary information, products or services for your website. The design strategy employed by most eCommerce, business and professional websites.

2 Link Directory's-Top down directory structure similar to Open Directory providing categories and subcategories for link organization. This strategy works best for web service companies and authorative websites that provide a diverse range of categorized and topical information.

The reciprocal link section of your website should be easily identifiable, reachable from your homepage, and should match your overall site design.

Managing reciprocal link exchanges and maintaining link directories are very time intensive tasks. There are several award winning programs, scripts and websites that can help you speed up the process; but a single good link exchange will still require at least 20 minutes of your time.

The two Leading SEO Website helper applications SEO Elite and Arelis both automatically create HTML pages that easily integrated into most websites. There are also many excellent commercial and free link exchange scripts available for adding a reciprocal link directory to your site. Our most commonly used scripts include Automate Link Exchange and Autolinks Pro Be careful choosing a commercial script or application, each has its own unique features and benefits that makes it stand out from the competitors. A new trend in link exchange websites is to automatically create pages for you. Each of the methods has advantages and disadvantages that will vary depending on your link strategy. Make sure that you select the one that will work best for your websites search engine marketing plan.

Finding Reciprocal Link Partners

From the list that you created in SEO Marketing 101 - STEP 3: COLLABERATIVE AND COMPLIMENTARY LINK CHANNELS add your suppliers, and complimentary services provider website information to your link pages. Notify each webmaster that you have placed their link on your link page and ask them to add your link information to their page. The reciprocal links that you get from your direct business partners will provide the most valuable return for your websites traffic, SERP, and Google PR. For most small / medium business websites their suppliers, and complimentary services provider links will not be enough to substantially increase the websites traffic; therefore they will have to find more link exchange partners.

There are several options for finding complimentary websites to help increase your websites traffic. You can:

use the keyword search methods that were described in SEO Marketing 101 - STEP 3:
join free or paid link exchange websites such as LinkMarket, LinkMetro, and others
search for themed reciprocal link directories like SEO Links and our Link Exchange Directory for links exchange
contract a SEO Company to manage your link exchanges.

Qualifying Reciprocal Link Exchange Websites

It's not the quantity of links pointing to your site, it is the quality of those links. So how does a new webmaster scale the quality and potential traffic value of exchanging links with a unknown webmasters site. Easily, by following well known guidelines provided by Google, MSN, Yahoo and the other search engines It is well known that search engines and web visitors put the foremost value on informative content; so by only linking to websites that are search engine friendly, provide quality content and the ability reciprocate traffic streams you will rapidly increase your websites traffic, SERP, Google PR and brand recognition..

The following steps can help you determine the websites search engine friendliness and the potential traffic increase for your website

1. Download and install the Google Toolbar

2. Visit the home page of the website you want to exchange links with to make sure that the websites content compliment your website

3.Use your Google toolbar to get the websites homepage PR, if the PR indicator in your Google toolbar is grayed out skip this link exchange. A grayed out PR indicator tells you that this website has been banned from Googles index and is on the way out of query results, linking to this website will probably adversely affect your website standing in Google, MSN, Yahoo and the others.

4.Verify that your potential link partners website is indexed in the major search engines by using the the search query command site:www.domainname.com You should a list of individual web pages contained within the website.

5. Go to the reciprocal link section of your potential link partners website and check to ensure

access to their reciprocal link pages are clearly visible on the home page
link partners website link info should be no more than 2 clicks from the home page
linked websites should be easy to find on your link page
text link ads provide a direct link back to link partner websites - test links by picking a current link from the page and using your browsers mouse over feature to verify that the link out does not contain a tracking code.
be certain that the nofollow tag is not being used in the websites link text

6. If your link exchange partners website contains more than one page per topic a search utility should be provided in the directory

7. Count the links on a reciprocal link page. Does the pages contain a reasonable amount of links - .Google suggest fewer than 100 but most search engine optimized link pages contain from 20 to 25 links

Use your judgment to see how easy it will be for this websites visitor to find your link and target traffic back to your website, after all a link on some unknown page that has no search engine position, minimum visitors or maybe no visitors at all is totally useless.

New website Considerations

New websites added to Googles index are often sandboxed and not assigned a PR value until Google has aged the site and determined an appropriate value. New websites are indicated with a PR0 in your toolbar

If the websites homepage shows PR0 you will want to investigate the website further. Enter the website URL into your Google search box and send your query to Google. If the website is not shown to be cached in Google you will have to use your best judgment to determine the value of the reciprocal link exchange. New websites that have not yet been indexed and sites that have been penalized by Google will not be cached

The most two most important questions to answer before exchanging links with both new and established websites include.

Would you recommend this website as a valuable resource to your visitors
Can this website reciprocate targeted traffic back to my website

You don't need to be an expert to do a good job! There are no tricks or secrets. You automatically increase the value of your links page for your visitors and search engines by providing them with access to the information they will look for anyway. By linking to search engine friendly sites that you honestly do recommend and not loading your pages down with any website that will link with you, your reciprocal link section can fit on 2-4 pages. With in a short period of time you will have traffic to your links pages helping to create an efficient contextual advertising network that can effectively send qualified traffic to your website and reciprocate targeted traffic to partner websites.

Contacting Link Exchange Partners

It is vital that you get to the point quickly, and that you show a relevant interest in the target site whether you are contacting the webmaster by email or telephone you must be prepared to quickly establish the reason for the contact, create interest in exchanging links, and show the reciprocating benefits. Mention one or two things about the site . Explain how beneficial a link exchange will be for both sites and site visitors. Put a link on your website to the target site before contacting the webmaster,. Tell the Webmaster where to locate their websites link. and provide the keywords or keyword phrase with which you want to be linked.

The three most common methods of contacting link exchange partners include:

Telephone - Most websites include an office telephone number
email - Most sites no longer display contact email address on their site pages because of spam email harvester software. You can contact webmasters through their 'contact us' form or use www.whois.com to obtain information contact information Draft a one-paragraph letter to the webmaster Keep the request short, simple and relevant to the target website.
Forms - On your website include a web page with a link exchange form so that potential link partners can easily send you their link exchange request and website information

Follow up: DO NOT follow up your request if you have not received a reply. If your approach was good and your research was thorough, the target site genuinely is not interested in linking to yours. The reason doesn't matter - move on to the next site.

Overall, you are going to find it is much easier to get links this way, even from sites bigger than yours. Telling people "I want to link to you as a recommended resource on (name of article) page..." tells them that you are a pro and not someone who has a linking program that spits out generic emails.

Monitoring Your Links

There are many unscrupulous webmasters and seo marketers that are looking to prey on inexperienced people. You can avoid being sucked into bad link situations by regularly visiting your partner websites and making sure they still qualify for a link on your website. All good directory scripts and seo helper applications contain tools to help you monitor your link.

Precaution

Google provides some great advice for webmaster's in regards to optimizing your website reciprocal links. One of my favorite quotes originates in Google Information for Webmasters Facts and Fiction

"Fiction: Joining a link exchange or "free-for-all" link program will boost my rankings.
Fact: Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good. Many sites that advertise link-sharing programs not only offer little value, but will distribute your email address without your permission, resulting in an increased volume of unwanted mail "

SEO MARKETING 101 STEP 22 ONE WAY LINKS will help you establish 'One Way' inbound links from authoritive websites