Reciprocal Link Exchange A Way To Increase Website Traffic
If you want to increase website traffic and grow your search engine rankings then one of the best ways that you can do that is by taking advantage of reciprocal link exchanges. Google will penalize you for not maintaining a healthy link profile and so it is important for the overall health of your website and business that you take the time to add them. This post will give an overview about what they are, how they work, how to find others who would be willing to offer one with your site in exchange for one from yours as well as some safety tips when running a reciprocal link exchange campaign.
The Details of a Reciprocal Link Exchange
A reciprocal link exchange is when you and someone else who has a site that is related to yours in some way agree to each list the other person's website as a resource on your website and then add a link to the other person's website from your own. For example: if you have a blog about the automotive industry, then you might look around for other automotive industry blogs that are within your niche and offer them to add a link back to your blog from theirs in exchange for doing the same.
This kind of exchange can be limited by type of site or even more specific, such as how many links are included in an agreement. You might limit it to just two sites that link to each other or you might add additional conditions, such as no more than three links per site or a maximum of five links total.
When running this kind of exchange, you will want to limit the number of reciprocal link exchanges that you have with each site in order to make sure that it does not cause you any issues with Google as it would be considered keyword stuffing if you had more than a few within a specific niche. This is something that I will discuss below, so keep reading!
Finding People To Do Exchange With
You may be tempted to just start contacting people in your niche and offer them an exchange, but there are better ways of approaching the situation. The way that you should set about this is by using a search engine to find people who are interested in doing the same thing that you are as well as looking for blogs that have been listed on websites within your niche. This can be done either manually or by using a specialized tool.
Searching For Sites To Exchange With
The safest way to go about finding other sites for reciprocal links is to use Google to find them. To do this you need to set up a Google Alert. What this will do is inform you via e-mail when new content related to your topic appears on the web, including if others are mentioning your own name or blog in their articles and posts.
One thing to note here is that you can also use Google Alerts to monitor the pages of others, not just yours. This can be useful if you need to stay on top of a blog that is counter productive for your own site and it is important for you to know when their posts are going up and when they are getting edited.
Using a Reciprocal Link Exchange Tool
There is some debate about the effectiveness of reciprocal link exchange tools as opposed to just doing everything manually, but there are plenty of tools that can help with this. The tool that I prefer is from Moz and it's called Free Link Finder . You can go here to get started and by entering the niche that you want to be linked to, you can find other sites in your niche that you can offer reciprocal links too as well as possibly find links to their articles on other websites.
There are others, but these two are my favorites so far. If you use a tool then it is a good idea to take a few minutes and write down the results for each site so that you have an accurate list of what possibilities are available for reciprocal links.
The Safety of Reciprocal Link Exchange Campaigns
While there is no real risk in running this type of campaign, there are some important things that you need to keep in mind if you choose to run one.
To start with, you need to remember that Google may be watching you. The folks at Google are concerned about over optimization, so if they notice that you are linking to a lot of sites within your niche where you don't have a strong presence then they will want to know why. They might also want to know what sites would be considered enough of a match for the keyword phrases that they rank for and especially how many links in total you have towards and from those websites.
This means that if you have one or two reciprocal links for multiple different keywords, this is okay but if it goes beyond a few then it will more than likely cause them concern as it might appear as an attempt at link manipulation which is against their terms of service.
It is also important when adding new links to make sure that you check the anchor text and remember that Google can pick up on this. If you are using the same anchor text for each link then this is fine, however it is more common amongst SEOs (Search Engine Optimization) companies to use only one of their own keyword phrases in the anchor text of a link.
If you are an SEO company and are getting a lot of visitors from reciprocal link exchanges then potentially your site could get adversely affected by Google if they find out about it. This is because Google could decide that your site is not getting the traffic it has earned on its own, but is getting a lot of traffic from link exchanges and that you have therefore paid for traffic.
The last thing to remember if you run a reciprocal link exchange campaign is that you need to be careful with who you are dealing with. If someone asks you for too much in return, then walk away from the deal. It's better to let an opportunity go then be forced to make a compromise when it comes to your web presence.
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Conclusion
It is important to remember that reciprocal links are a very powerful way to get your blog site to rank better when you are an SEO, so if you want to try using them then it is important that you keep these points in mind.
It is also worth remembering that when possible, it's best not to use link exchanges as the main means of increasing your search engine optimization results and instead focus on building up your own site through content that is relevant and useful. This will most likely offer a better return on investment because the search engines will appear more often in their results than they would with content from other sites.