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Reciprocal Linking
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Setting up Your Reciprocal Links Pages
You would think that setting up a reciprocal links directory would be easy, just throw up a page titled “links” on your website and add websites to it. But you should put some thought and time into setting up your directory. How you choose to set up your links directory will affect how many other webmasters want to link to your website.
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The first thing you should do is brain storm categories of links that you believe visitors of your website would be interested in. This is very important because you don't want visitors of your website to come take a look at your links and say “These are useless”, or “Why do they link to all these sites about dog care, I came here to find information on skateboarding, not dogs!”
After brainstorming your categories you need to decide whether or not you will have separate pages for each category, or if you want to have all the categories on one page. I recommend you set up separate pages for each category, unless you know that you will only be linking out to a handful of sites (preferably under 50, definitely under 100).
You should make your links page easy to find. I am MUCH more likely to trade links with a website where I can easily find its links page. I also recommend that your links page be accessible from every page on your website. This helps increase it's Google® Page Rank®. Many webmasters search for high Page Rank® links pages to trade links with. For this reason, I recommend diverting as much Page Rank® to your links pages as possible. Besides linking to your main Links page from every page on your site. I also recommend that you do one of two things to help increase your links pages Page Rank®:
1.Link to each separate category page from your home page, or from every page on your site.
OR
2.Interlink all of your links pages. For an example of this take a look at the links pages on my site (you can get to them by going here:
http://websitepromotionbook.com/links.html). Notice, the categories are repeated at the bottom of each links page.
Another good idea, is to search the major Search Engines top 20 results for sites in the categories you chose, and link to some of the sites you like the most. You could ask for reciprocal links from them in the process, but it's not necessary to do so at this point. Once you establish some links to top rated sites, your links pages may become considered a hub site, which will mean that those pages will be listed higher in the Search Engines. This will help webmasters who are actively looking to exchange links find your site, and they will ask for reciprocal links. This is because they will find your site when analyzing the sites that link to the top ranked website in their category.
Lastly, you need to make it clear on your website that you are open to exchanging links. You can do this by either using an automated script to exchange links or by explaining how webmasters can contact you to ask about exchanging reciprocal links with your site. The reason you want to make this clear is that more people are likely to ask for a reciprocal link if you state clearly that you are interested in exchanging links with other websites that you approve of.
* Google and Page Rank are registered trademarks of Google Inc.
Reciprocal Linking excerpted from "The Truth about Website Promotion"
Written by George Manty
To learn more about reciprocal linking visit
http://websitepromotionbook.com
This article can be reproduced in whole or in part,
providing this byline is included along with a link to
http://websitepromotionbook.com
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