Who / How to target for reciprocal links
By David Callan
Reciprocal linking is one of the most effective ways of
driving targeted mass numbers of people to your website,
however in
order to be successful you've to carefully target and choose
the sites you want to link with.
What you need to be doing is focusing on linking to similar
high-traffic quality sites which will interest your visitors
and which complement your site, not compete with it. Sending
visitors to a competing site with a similar product is a
big mistake because the chances are good that they'll buy
your their product and not yours.
Try not to down-link which is what I call it when a site
links with a site with far less traffic than it. Always aim
to up-link with a few high traffic sites rather than a bunch
of low traffic ones. The results are much better.
My favorite and first thing to do when looking for sites
to target is to try a take traffic away from my competition.
I do this by visiting http://www.altavista.com or any other
search engine which will tell me which sites link to which.
Imagine for example you knew your competition was www.xyz.com.
You would go to Altavista and type in link:competition.com
leaving out the http://www. part. To follow the above format
you'd type in link:xyz.com and do the search, Altavista will
return all the sites in its database that link to www.xyz.com.These
are the first few sites you want to link to because you know
they're sending traffic and business to your competition
and you want a piece of action too. Chances are if these
sites link to your competitor they'll link to you too.
Depending on the industry of your business and your competitor,
he or she could have hundreds of links so be prepared to
be held up for quite some time. It's well worth it however
because you're effectively taking visitors away from your
competitors site by having your link wherever their link
is.
The next way you can target sites to link with is by visiting
one of the major search sites, either Yahoo.com or Google.com.
The advantage these two sites have over other search sites
when it comes to targeting links is that usually results
from these are of a very high standard. In Yahoo.com's case
it's because all sites are reviewed by a human editor and
in Google.com's case it's because they use link popularity
as one of the main factors of relevancy when returning results
from a search meaning only good quality sites are returned.
You're on either Google.com or Yahoo.com, now enter keywords
and keyphrases which relate to the theme of your website,
remember you don't want to link to competitive sites so try
not to be too specific on your search term. If I was doing
this I wouldn't enter 'Internet marketing articles' because
chances are most results would be competitive sites, I'd
enter in 'Internet marketing' because it's a wide area but
still related to my website theme and not necessarily competing
with me. The sites that show up for these results are prime
targets. Ask for links with these guys, next you can target
the guys who have links to them. The possibilities are endless.
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