How Important Is Reciprocal Linking?

As tedious as reciprocal linking is, it is a very important part of your search engine optimization campaign. Many will link with any Web site and build thousands of links just to build up their Google Page Rank. But what is not realized that many times this doesn't help your rankings or your PR. It's important that when you are building links you do it the correct way.

A few things to remember is that you should choose sites to link with that are related to the theme of your Web site. For example if you have a Web design site you may choose to link with a site that also does Web design and hosting. Now you might think that "this is a competitor and why would I want to do that!" Many have a different opinion when it comes determining if they should link to a competitor or not. In my opinion, linking with a competitor can be beneficial and chances of sending away your customers is not likely. You should be cautious though and make your own judgement before doing this.

Another important factor in your reciprocal link campaign is that you should create variations your link text periodically so that you are not displaying the same text on a bunch of sites, but remember to keep your keywords in that text. One of your main goals with linking is to make your link building look like it is naturally done to the search engines.

So what about one way links? These are better than reciprocal links because it means you have less outgoing links, but it is a lot harder to do because many site owners don't give you a link without linking back to them. One way to resolve this is to build great content that people will want to link to as a good resource of information. Another resolution is that you can purchase text links. Be careful when doing this because Google is now figuring out a way to detect these and may not be counted as a link; well it may be counted but not have an impact on your rankings or Google PageRank.

Remember... Keep it related, natural, and build great content! Happy linking!