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Articles Index >> Marketing
Using Reciprocal Links to Get More Traffic
by Michael Cheney
Search engines generally look for a series of criteria when ranking websites
in their positions. They look at which phrases you have and the weighting of
these phrases and keywords on your page. Search engines will also look at how
much of a resource they see you as. They also measure the relevancy of your
website. But one of the most important factors that search engines, like Google,
look at is how many websites are linking to you.
Generally speaking, the more links you have coming into your website, the more
traffic you will get. If you think about it, the Internet is nothing more than
a collection of websites linking to one another. So when some webmasters say
that they are not willing to exchange links, they are missing the whole point
of the Internet.
You cannot expect to get lots and lots of traffic on the Internet if you’re
not going to send some of that traffic to other people. It’s like joining
a neighborhood community and not helping anyone else out, but expecting all
the help in the world when you have a problem to face.
Search engines are just pieces of software, so how else are they going to measure
your site’s relevancy apart from looking to external factors. It used
to be the case that search engines would look to onsite factors such as your
Meta tags and phrases. They do still do that, but more and more they are looking
towards community centric factors. That is, what your web community is saying
about you.
The more inbound links you have, the more visitors you will get. Each link
into your website is like a vote for your website. If there are two similar
websites competing for the same position and ranking on a search engine, it’s
the website that has the most links coming in that is normally listed higher
in that search engine’s rankings.
The more inbound links you have, the larger your web footprint. The larger
your footprint on the web, the greater your influence is. This means that search
engines see you as a massive resource on the web.
You can’t expect people to link to you for no reason. Unless you have
a massive website that’s highly regarded and is very well branded, it’s
unlikely that hundreds and thousands of people will link to you without you
having to do anything. What you really should do is link to other relevant websites
first, then contact them and ask them to reciprocate.
But it’s not the status of an inbound link that’s important. It’s
also the nature of that link. You need to be linked to from quality, relevant
websites. There’s no point having hundreds of irrelevant sites linking
to you. This will do you no good in the search engines because search engines,
more and more, are looking for relevancy of links, not just the mere existence
of a link.
The other thing that is important to your link optimization is that you get
people to link to you in the right way. Get them to link to you using phrases
and keywords that you want to be highly ranked for. Don’t just get them
to link to you using your web address or the words ‘click here’.
Good luck with your link building and link popularity.
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