If you run a business website, or plan to start a website for your business, you may know that getting links back to your site is critical to your success. You have probably heard people talk about “reciprocal linking” and “backlinks.” Still, you might not understand exactly what this linking process entails or why it’s so important for your business.
Search engines, especially Google, look at the number of links to your website in determining your ranking in their search engine results pages (SERPS). Google PageRank is based largely on the number of backlinks your site has, and the quality of those links.
Note that the quality of the links is important. Website owners used to submit their sites to Free for All links pages and get lots of links back to their sites. As with many other things that used to work when the web was smaller, this is no longer a reliable way of getting quality links. The search engines look at these “link farms” as junk links, and don’t count them in your backlinks.
It is more important than ever now to create quality links back to your site. Ideally, these links will come from sites that link to you without your having to link back. These are called one-way links, and are the most valuable links your website can have.
Article writing and submission is one good way to get one-way links; the article directories and ezines that use your articles will publish them with your link intact. These are good quality links, and the more articles you create, the more links you can accumulate.
You may also pay for one-way links, but the word is that Google is starting to ignore obviously paid links. Some of the larger companies selling one-way text links are now “flagged” by Google, and links purchased from these companies do not count in Google PageRank.
Not all good links are one-way links. Google also respects reciprocal links, or link trades, if the linking site is a quality site and not a link farm. While one-way links are more valuable in calculating PageRank, reciprocal links are easier to get, and Google does pay attention to them.
One way to get reciprocal links is to visit other websites and ask them for a reciprocal link, or a link exchange. While this is a tedious task, it is a good way to find well-qualified sites to trade links with. It is well worth spending some time finding really good sites to do exchanges with.
You can also use a reputable link exchange directory to find sites that are interested in exchanging links with related sites. When you choose a directory, make sure that it includes the types of sites that you’re looking for, and that the links will come directly from the other sites, rather from the directory. You’re using the directory primarily as a search tool to find related websites that may be interested in exchanging links.
As always, the quality of your website still matters, of course, but you can give your site a real boost in search engine rankings by getting good backlinks from related sites.