Reciprocal Linking
Getting listed in the search engines is only part of the battle for traffic - many webmasters stop at this stage without looking to the longer term future. Not only must you resubmit your pages on a regular basis to maintain your search engine rankings, you also have to monitor the ever changing algorithms used by these sites in order to preserve your rankings.
A certain method of gaining visitors to your site is by forming relationships with other sites of a similar nature or theme. Some may say that reciprocal links are the best way to lose traffic from your site, I disagree. The most popular sites on the web are no more than enormous link portals - people visit these sites in order to gain access to a wide variety of others. You can achieve this, albeit on a much smaller scale. If your visitors see that you can provide filtered access to a variety of sites with themes similar to your own, they will be likely to return in the future - long term traffic is more important than short-term, untargeted traffic.
By sharing traffic with other sites of a similar nature, everyone benefits. You can achieve a consistent long term traffic flow by exchanging links. If, for some reason, a search engines drops all your pages, you can still rely on links from other sites for traffic while you figure out why your pages were dropped!
So how do you go about exchanging links in the first place? Chances are, you already know who your competitors are, and which other sites complement your own without being direct competitors. In the first instance, you should send emails to the webmasters / techical contacts at the sites you wish to exchange links with. Most webmasters in my experience are more than happy to exchange links, since they also realise the importance of shared traffic.
Next, you should create a dedicated links page. Make sure you upload links in a reasonable time, to show your commitment to fellow webmasters. After a while, you should see a noticeable increase in traffic to your site. If you use a tracking tool - either server based, e.g. Webtrends , or a hosted service, you'll be able to see how much traffic is coming your way from your new contacts. After a few weeks, you may find that the balance of traffic is unequal - if you are sending a site far more traffic than you are receiving in return, it may be an idea to reduce the prominence of that particular link - but try to keep in touch with all your contacts.
Crucially, you'll also find that many of the key search engines use link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Google, most importantly, uses this method to determine page rankings, so you'll have the added benefit of increased free traffic from search engines, as well as the benefits of reciprocal links with other sites.
So, don't stop at the search engines, go another step further and exchange links with sites similar to your own - this is essential to the long term success of your site, since search engines can change at any time, while longer term traffic exchanges with your competitors is far more enduring.
This article was first published on the Bytestart website. We have reproduced it by kind permisison of Bytestart.
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