Gath Adams

Reciprocal links have gone out of style for most SEOs, but I still get good rankings from recip links - and they are much easier to get than one-way links.

This method also helps you find relevant links. Relevant links help 2 ways

• They are judged as more valuable by Search Engines versus an otherwise equal link on a non-relevant site.
• If a person browsing the site, they might actually click on a relevant link.

The easiest way to find relevant links, is to choose a competitor and find out who links to them. Chances are, they will also be happy to link to you. This is a major feature of programs like ARELIS (I know, cause I own it) but if you have more time than money, you can do it on the cheap.

Yahoo has the great ‘linkdomain’ command, but the results can be a bit of a pain to sift through. This one is much better:
http://johannesmueller.com/tools/yse/

OK, so now you have a list of potential link partners. Now you have to contact these people - tedious but important.

For every reciprocal link that you want to chase, visit the website & see if they are actually likely to link to you. If they have an area for links, or better yet an information page which your link would fit into then they are worth getting in touch with.

Go to the ‘About’ page of the site and find the name of the person behind it as well as their contact email. You will get much better results if you personalise the ‘link beg’ as much as possible.

Now that you are sure you are going to write to the person, add their link to your site. Don’t wait for them to put their link to you up, why should they make the first move?

Writing the Link Beg email
Address it to the site owner personally and comment on something that stands out on their site (eg a picture) to show that you have visited it. Mention that you think their site is useful to your visitors and you have put a link up already (give them the URL) and say that their visitors might find your site useful as well. Finally, always give the complete HTML for the reciprocal link that you want. This makes it easy for the webmaster to cut-and-paste the code right into their site, and allows you to get the anchor text that you want.

If you are concerned about leaving one-way links on your site to other sites that don’t respond, then keep track of your emails in a spreadsheet. Allow a few weeks for all the responses to come through.