What's Wrong with Reciprocal Linking? - page 3

by Elliot Jarves, 8/17/2007

Signature usage is really simple. It is the task of commenting on blogs or forums that are related to your sites general topic. The benefit is a self-placed backlink to your own site. These links can usually even be to pages on the interior of your web site not just the home page. One of the best techniques to generate traffic from your signature is to offer link followers a discount or unique benefit just for following that link.

Site development is simply the process of making your site attractive and friendly to visitors. Sometimes this is called Visitor Experience Optimization (VEO). VEO becomes more and more important as your site gains more and more visitors. Your goal is to have a site that keeps a visitor there as long as possible. It will also increase the likely hood that anonymous webmasters will place links on their site to your site without a request from you - a 1-way link.

Social bookmarking is one of those things that webmasters may do that will make them feel funny and seem like they aren't doing the right thing. It's really OK as long as it is done without complete automation and without the intent to spam the bookmarking sites. What you are really trying to do is submit a vote for your own sites' pages (don't submit every single page of your site) into the bookmarking sites. Hopefully someone else will see your submission and agree with your vote and so on and so on. This technique will not work with every web site but it is worth at least submitting your pages to a group of bookmarking sites with some hope...

Finally, for those reciprocal request that you will undoubtedly continue to receive, contextual linking is what you want. Even if it is a reciprocal link between sites, if it is embedded within the normal context of the other webmasters web site it will be more trusted than a standard reciprocal link. Basically it will appear more natural to the user and to the search engine bots. Obviously for it to make sense, any reciprocal linking should only be done between sites that are related in some way and please don't make every incoming link appear the same. Change the text of the link and the context of the paragraph or page the link comes from so that it once again appears natural.

Of course, even if you do all of these things perfectly, there is no guarantee that you will be on the first page of any search engine result pages. But you will at least have a chance and will outrank a vast majority of the competition sites in the coming years.

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About the author

Click Here: to see why directory submission IS the best way to go. http://directory.profitsdomain.com. After securing a computer science degree, Elliot decided to search the web for interesting and profitable ventures. Working on his current project at Profitsdomain.com

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