Link Trading or Reciprocal Link Building

(Off-Page Optimization) 

Link Trading or Reciprocal Link Building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters are willing to link to any website that will link back to them. You need to be a bit more particular than this because you want to have links from Websites that are related to yours and that are Quality Sites. 

Also you want the sites to be of interest to your visitors and contain information or products and services that would be beneficial to your visitors.

A Quality Site is a Website that has many inbound Links and High PageRank

Six Steps to Accomplishing Manual Link Trading:

1.  Build a Links Page or Links Directory

Before you contact a webmaster or another site about trading links (let's call them Link Partners), you'll want to have a page on your site where you can put the links that point back to other sites.  If you plan on accumulating a large number of these links, then you'll want to set this up as a multiple page directory with Topic and Sub-topic Categories, rather than a single page. 

You can expect a better response from a potential Link Partner if they know you have a Links Page or Directory.  When you contact them, you'll be able to tell them the URL of the page where you put the link to their site.

2.  Determine What Kinds of Sites will Help Your Traffic

You don't start making contacts by sending a mass mailing to everyone on the Web and ask them to link to your site.  This could get you into trouble for Spamming.  You need to determine what kinds of sites would help your traffic and would have visitors who would be interested in your site.

What is your Target Market?  You want to find Sites related to your Target Market.  Let me give you an example:

Say you have a site that sells Gourmet Coffee.  What's related to Gourmet Coffee?  Coffee cups and mugs (especially mugs with personalized printing on them), specialty teas, coffee pots, teapots, hot cup plates or holders, coffee beans, coffee bean grinders.  You get the picture!

In addition to bringing more visitors to your site, who are interested in the content of your site, getting links to your site from content related sites will give you better returns in the search engines.  Google, in particular determines query matches using many factors, and one of these factors is the comparison of the content of pages linking to your pages.  Here's an excerpt from Google's Search Technology page:

Google ... examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

3.  Search Out Potential Link Partner Websites

Use the Search Engines and Directories on the web.
And the best search engines are: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
And the best directories are: Open Directory Project and Yahoo!

Perform your searches by using the keywords you have chosen for your Website (See the topic on Keyword Lists and Placement), this will find the websites that are similar to yours and are also your competition.

Then check the Directories and look in the Categories that relate to your Website, as well as other categories that are similar, or in your Target Market.

4.  Determine if Their Site is Worthy of Linking to Your Site?

When you are starting out with a new website, you'll want to take almost any link you can get from other sites.  A link from anybody, (even a low PR site) is better than no link at all. 

But, do try and get a lot of your links from sites that are relevant to your site and have quality content, regardless of their PageRank. This is what will really help you with the search engines.  The search engines will give you extra points when you have links from lots of sites that relate to your content.

• Beware of Link Farms
  A Link Farm is a Website or set of Web pages created solely for the purpose of gaining high search engine rankings by trying to get a large number of incoming links. This kind of site has very little or no content and it consists almost entirely of pages of very long lists of unrelated links that are in no particular order.
  
  These types of pages are penalized by almost all the search engines. Some search engines may even ban the entire site as they consider this tactic to be a kind of spamming.
   
• Beware of Quick Link Building
  Also, the search engines are watchful of websites that add a large number of links in a short period of time and many will penalize you for doing this.  So using a web service that offers to sell you a large number of links for a price, might end up having a negative effect on your search engine rankings, even though it is a quick way to build your inbound links
  
  The right way to do this is to have the service gradually add links over time so the search engines won't detect a sudden increase in links to your site.  The search engines will see this as an acceptable gradual link building process

As you acquire more inbound links and your website climbs in the search engine rankings  you can become more picky, concentrating mainly on getting links only from sites that have content related to yours.   Hopefully you'll get some links from high PR sites but don't let this guide your entire link campaign.  Getting links from high PR sites is "Icing on the Cake", but the cake needs to be made up of multiple content related links.

A PR of 6 or higher is a very high PR and would be a good page to get a link from.

If your site is not indexed by the search engines, getting a link from a PR6 page should get you indexed in a couple of days. Getting a link from a PR3 or PR4 page should get you indexed in a week or two.

The Google Toolbar is a FREE download.  It will integrate with many Web browsers and it displays the PageRank of each Web page that you visit.  

5.  Collect Information on Potential Link Partners as You Search

It will be very easy to get overwhelmed by all the information you will be looking at so you need a good way to keep track of it.  Use a word processor, a Table form, or a spreadsheet to help you keep track of all this information.

Here's the main information you'll want to collect:

1. Home Page URL (Web address).
2. Name of the site owner or Webmaster.  If you don't see it listed, check out their  "Contact Us" page.
3. E-mail address of the person you will be contacting
4. PageRank of their Home Page.  This isn't required information but it will come in handy if you don't get a response from them and you need to decide later if it is worth your time and effort to continue trying to make contact.
5. The Date you contact them.  This helps you keep track of your progress. 
6. You'll also want to have a place to record a follow-up date in case you decide to contact them a second time. 

I would not bother contacting anyone a third time.  If you haven't received a response after a second contact, they probably aren't interested in trading links with you and you'll be wasting your time.

Here's a tool you can use to find out information on a Website.
It's called:  Whois Source.  http://www.whois.sc/
If you go to this site and type in the URL of a Website you are interested in (for example:  "www.citysales.com") you can find out who the site is registered to and the contact information.

6.  Finally, Contact the Sites

The easiest and best way to contact each site is to send them an email.  But don't send them a note that looks generic because they will likely consider it as spam and just delete it without reading it. 

You can start with a generic form letter that you use as a template for everyone, but try to write the template so it sounds like it came from a "human being" and is not spam created by a computer.  Then simply insert the information you collected during your search for Link Partners.

Here's the main information you should include in your note:

1. Introduce yourself and state that you have a Website.  This way they know you are someone special and not just any "Joe" or "Sally" who is sending them the email.
    
2. State that you'd like to trade links with them.
    
3. If their site has content similar to yours, then note this fact in the letter so they will know that trading links with you will be beneficial to their site.  Say something like you have similar products, services or information so visitors will be interested in both sites.
    
4. Tell them the URL of the page on your site where you have placed a link pointing to their site.  You don't have to do this first, but you will get a better response to your note if you have already set up a link to them, so they can check it out.  If you don't get a response back from them within a reasonable amount of time (30 days) then you'll want to remove this link from your site.
   
   Many websites have an "Add a Link" page and you can get the information from this page showing you how they would like their link on your page to look.  You should be able to do a simple cut and paste of this information to your page to set up the link.
   
   Many time you can use a website's "Add a Link" page to submit your request to them for a link exchange.  They will have all of the required information spelled out so you can just follow their instructions, submit your request, and then wait for their response.  This would save you the time of writing a separate email to them.
    
5. Specify the URL and the anchor text of the link you want them to put on their site, pointing back to your site.
   
   The anchor text is the text that a user sees on the page, and that's what they click on.  The reason you want to be so specific is that a text link on another Web page that points to your page will help with your search engine ranking if the "anchor text" contains your keywords.  This is a very important part of Off-Page Optimization.

Manual Link Building Takes A Lot Of Time

This process of Link Building takes time and can be frustrating, especially if negative responses or a lack of responses will bother you.

• Don't try to accomplish too much at once. 
• The whole process will take months if you want to acquire a lot of links.
• Pace Yourself, but be consistent. 
• Work on it a little bit each day, but keep at it.

Remember, you are dealing with people and not just computers.  People can forget or get busy with other things, so you might not get a response in a day or two.  Some people maintain multiple websites and are extremely busy.

If you don't get a response within a couple of weeks, then you'll need to determine if you want to send a follow-up request.  Look at their PR and see if it's worth your time.  Don't spend a lot of time trying to get a link from a site with a PR of 0 or 1.  There are millions of web sites out there and there are plenty of people who will be willing to trade links with you. 
You Must Use your time wisely.

Once a site has set up a link pointing back to your site, they should send you a note letting you know that it has been done.

Click the Tutorial Next button to learn how the Link Building Process can be made much easier by using Tools that automate the process

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See the Link Exchange Policy for Web Builders Cafe