The Reciprocal Link-Building Process

[Rijas]

The Reciprocal Link-Building Process

The process for setting up and managing a reciprocal link campaign is as follows. I recommend you use tools such as SEO Elite or Arelis to help you out, but you can do it manually if you wish.

Do a search of your most important keywords on Google, as mentioned before.

1. Determine which sites link to you now and which link to your competitors, as mentioned before. Visit each site and pare down the list as needed.

2. Obtain the email address of each website owner. This can be done several different ways:

a. Determine the email address directly from their Contact Us page.

b. Use the Who is utility from a domain registrar to look up the email address from the domain name record.

c. Use SEO Elite or Arelis, which have built-in Whois utilities to obtain the email address for a
site owner.

3. Create a dedicated email account on your web server, such as link-
partners@YourDomain.com, to help manage your efforts.

4. Create one or more email "templates" to use for contacting your prospective link
partners. This is simply a form letter with _placeholders_ that allow the email
address to be automatically merged in. Most email clients, such as Microsoft
Outlook and Eudora, allow you to generate templates for this purpose.

5. One simple way of sending the same email to multiple people is to use the _bcc_
option (blind carbon) in your email program. This way, each email recipient won_t
see all the other email recipients.

6. Be sure and include sample link code in your email template that can be copied
by your prospective linking partners.

7. Once you start getting, make sure you have links to their sites on your links page.
You will get a much higher response rate if you put their link on your site first.

8. Systematically manage, track and expand your efforts. Get in the habit of
spending at least one hour per week looking for new link partnerships. Your goal
is to find new targeted traffic in as many different relevant locations as possible.


Reciprocal Linking Best Practices

Although the blanket statement of _get as many links as possible_ applies in general, here are some tips and best practices for prioritizing your link exchange efforts:

" Only exchange links with sites that are relevant to, or are in a complementary market to, as your own business.

" Focus first on getting links from pages with a high PageRank (PR). Links from low PR pages won_t influence your ranking negatively, but you probably won_t be getting an appreciable PR boost unless you have a large number of them.

" Don_t discount the power of low PR pages directing traffic to your site. Today's PR = 3 page could be tomorrow's PR = 6 page.

" Your best links will be from sites that have a large number of incoming links themselves and that also have a relatively small number of outgoing links (such sites are called authorities). Make sure these sites are relevant to your theme or keywords.

" Try to get your link on a page that is as close to their home page as possible. A link has less PR if it is buried several levels deep.