Off Page SEO: Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking is where you request a link from another webmaster and in return you place their link on your website.
Traditionally this was done by emailing site owners. Now you can join services specifically that make it very easy to exchange links. One such service is http://www.linkmmarket.com
There various ways of executing reciprocal link exchange, depending on your type of web site.
The most common method is to have a links page in your site, where you display links to your link exchange partner sites. Some webmasters just dump all links there without bothering to classify them (eg business, finance, health etc). This gives rise to a phenomenon called "link farm". In this scenario, the webmaster does not care about the convenience of his visitors (as a matter of fact does not expect tem to go there). Search engines frown on this practice, and sometimes ignore links on such pages and in some cases remove such sites from it's index in extreme cases. In the SEO world, such sites are referred to as "bad neighborhoods" and discerning webmasters keep clear of such sites.
Another scenario is to have a link page(s) and sort the links into categories for ease of reference. If you take the time to screen websites before you exchange links with them, having your visitors interest in mind, you will end up with a links page that add value to your site and boosts your Page Rank (PR, Google's way of ranking web pages based on the number of links pointing to it, by Google's count. Not all links count. It goes from 0 to 10, 10 being the most important or highly ranked).
The ideal scenario, especially for a content resource site is to place links within the main content pages. Let's say you have a site on fish farming for example. What you can do is to exchange links with other sites (local and international) about fish, fishing, fish based dishes etc, anything fish. Now you have articles about farming Tilapia. In the middle of the article or at the end (as additional resources), you display links on Tilapia etc. In this way, the links contain useful additional material related to the article. This is more natural, more useful to your visitors and more highly regarded by the search engines. It means you are recommending that site. It means the site is good. Everybody wins, the visitor in terms of useful resources, the search engines by being assisted by a human to determine which sites are useful, and you by higher rankings and ultimately more traffic.
The best way to go, and to win with the search engines is to have the interest of your visitors uppermost in your mind. By doing this, you build a quality site that generates goodwill from visitors and search engines and ultimately smile to the bank.
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