Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

Should you care about reciprocal links?

Yes!

Not only do reciprocal links help your Search Engine ranking, but reciprocal links can account for a large amount of targeted traffic to your website. In fact, there have been studies that have shown that most websites get more traffic from reciprocal links than they do from Search Engines. While part of this may be due to the fact that most websites are not optimized for Search Engines and therefore don’t get a lot of Search Engine traffic, reciprocal links still can bring you a huge amount of traffic.

When you get reciprocal links, you never know which ones will drive the most traffic to your website. Very early on in promoting our first site, I was very surprised when we got a link from a child related site, and that week we got about 70 referrals from it. That was ten times the traffic we were getting from other reciprocal links. Then a couple of weeks later, we got a link on the home page of a website that brought in about 3000 unique visitors that week (about 430 visitors a day). That was way more traffic than we were getting from other avenues at the time. So you can see that a good reciprocal link from a related, high quality website can bring you as much, or even more traffic then the Search Engines are bringing you. This is very important to keep in mind. Even if Search Engines greatly devalue the importance of links to determine Search Engine rankings, you should still trade reciprocal links with other websites because of the traffic you will get from the reciprocal links. Also, because of the benefit that users to your site will get from quality links on your site.

From a personal perspective, when I visit websites I sometimes like to look at the links on their sites. I think having a links page makes for a better user experience. Hyperlinks is one of the big benefits of the web. If you create a website, be sure to link out to other quality sites. It’s what your visitors expect and want.

One other current advantage to exchanging links is that your website can be given hub site status from Search Engines.

I also recommend linking to other sites that you find valuable, even if they don’t exchange links with you. The reason is that your goal should be to create the best quality content on the web. If you know of great resources for your visitors, you should tell them about these resources. It also looks more natural to the Search Engines and you will be rewarded for this (especially if the websites you link to are considered authority sites).