Link Building – Reciprocal Linking

Along with Directory Submission, reciprocal linking should be one of the first link building techniques applied to new sites. Some will argue that reciprocal linking is no longer what it used to be, and that’s true, Google no longer gives as much value to reciprocal linking as it once did and instead gives more value to one way linking. However, reciprocal linking is still highly valuable, especially for new sites but only if you do it right. By taking and applying the steps below you maximize the effect of your campaign and minimize the amount of time you spend.

First you need to collect a list of sites you’d like to reciprocate links with. The idea here is to find sites that have some PR and are also in your niche or category. To do this head over to Google and search for terms like “Add URL” + Link Building, “Submit Site” + Link Building, etc, replacing Link Building with your own niche. This will bring up a list of sites in your category which allow you to add your link, usually at the cost of a reciprocal link. Go through the list of sites and on a piece of paper or in a text file, keep a 3 columned list of the name of the site, the URL and the contact email address. Usually you can find the latter by having a quick look around the page for a Contact Us link or something similar.

The following terms are worth searching for to try and find reciprocal links, just add your niche after the term, i.e. “Add site” + Link Building. The double quotes ensure that that exact term is found. “Add site”, “Add your website”, “Submit URL”, “Submit your site”, “Suggest site”, “Suggest URL”, “Exchange links”, “Swap links”.
Another good method which will often return better results is to search for inurl: links.htm + Reciprocal Linking or inurl: linktous.html + SEO. You can try this with different extensions (.php, .shtml, etc) and see what you get.

Once you have a list of 50 or 60 sites you feel are worth getting a link from, you want to send out a quick email to all of them asking if they’ll add a link to your site. Here is a sample email you can send:

Dear webmaster,

I am the webmaster of [www.seanbluestone.com] and I'm sending this email to see if you're interested in trading links with me.

At [SeanBluestone.com] we [offer articles and resources on a wide range of topics including SEO, Self Improvement, Making Money Online] and more. We launched in [September 2008] and already hundreds of people interested in [self improvement and SEO] visit our site every day. We're currently at [Page Rank 4].

I feel that your site [www.targetsite.com] matches the content of my own and as such our visitors would find your site useful and vice versa.

If you are interested in swapping links please include the HTML link below on your links page and email me back with the anchor text and description you would like me to use and I'll add your link to [www.seanbluestone.com/links.htm] within 48 hours. This page also contains more information on how to link back to us though if you have any further questions or requests feel free to include them in a reply to this email.

<a href="http://www.seanbluestone.com">SeanBluestone.com</a> - Articles and resources on SEO, Self Improvement, Making Money Online and more.

Thanks for your time,

[Sean Bluestone

http://www.seanbluestone.com]

All parts which you will need to edit are included in square brackets. Simply edit these parts for your own site and personalize the email a bit, then send it out to each of the webmasters on your list. The more people you send it out to the better, because typically you’ll only receive a reply to 1 in 10 sites. For those sites which are more important and have a higher PR you might want to try again with a different more personalized email and include their link before you send your proposal.

Using these methods you can generally find a few hundred potential links and email them all within 20-25 minutes. This will save you a huge amount of time and even if you only get 10-15 links from it, you’ve spend nothing and gained alot. After you’ve exhausted all the sites on Google you can try Yahoo! which will typically give you twice to three times as many. Some people may have a problem with what they see as spam, but so long as you personalize the email a little and take the actions you specify in your email, you keep things professional and should have no problems.

A nice alternative or addition to this method is to use automated software to create a place where other webmasters can come to your site and add their link. The script then checks their site to make sure they have a reciprocal link and if so, adds them to your list. This has the advantage that you don’t need to email lots of people, they can come to you and create a reciprocal link without the need for a response. The disadvantage is that unless this page is indexed and ranking it’s unlikely they’ll find you. A couple of free options are My Link Helper – http://www.mylinkhelper.com – and PHP Link Directory – http://www.phplinkdirectory.com.

As an alternative you can try reciprocal link exchange directories. These are third party sites which are a haven for people looking for reciprocal links. Sites are normally grouped by category and you can usually narrow down results by other criteria. Two of the better ones are Build Reciprocal Links – http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com – and The Link Exchange Directory – http://www.link-exchange.ws – though there are plenty more out there.

Whichever methods you chose to implement reciprocal linking is very important for new sites and while not as powerful as it was in the early days of Google, I have seen many major, high ranking sites get where they are because their primary SEO strategy is reciprocal links.

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