You Are Being Lied About Reciprocal Links!
If you maintain a website online seek to market it, you may have
been told or even offered reciprocal links. Most advertisements
promise that such a venture can get more people to go to your
site, raise your search engine rankings, and add to consumer and
surfer interest in your product, service, or craft.
What are reciprocal links?
Reciprocal linking, as the name implies, is just exchanging
links with a website selling products or services similar to
yours. They will promise to post your link on their site if you
promise to post their link on yours. Visitors to your site will
most likely visit theirs, and visitors to their site will most
likely visit yours.
Just how effective are reciprocal links? Are they all hype? Are
you, as the careful web designer and developer, being told
everything about them?
The aim of most reciprocal link exchangers is to increase their
site's search engine rankings. However, according to a study,
finding sites on search engines contributes only about 15% to a
website's traffic. Reciprocal linking, then, will not get you
traffic through search engine ranking.
So what purpose does reciprocal linking serve? It can get you
traffic, but only and mostly if people click on your site's link
from someone else's site.
How can you substantially increase your traffic through
reciprocal linking? If your link appears in as many other sites
as possible. This will mean that you have to list a great number
of links yourself ? but if you have a lot of useful links on
your links page, you can actually help your site visitors, and
make your website credible.
If you have a useful website with lots of links, and with other
people linking back to you, you can get more people to visit
your site, and keep up a good stream of Internet traffic. You
can be famous in no time, right?
Reciprocal linking can help boost your Internet popularity,
true, but only if done correctly. With more webmasters concerned
with popularity rather than content, however, reciprocal linking
with as many people as possible may actually be more to your
detriment than benefit.
Why is this so?
1. Some sites do not have consistently good content
Sure, you link to many websites, and have them link back to you,
but just how good are these websites?
If the website that links to you does not get updated, or does
not have good content, chances are, they won't be getting any
visitors, and you won't be getting any from them. And if your
website links to them, and your visitors go to their site, do
you think they'll love you for linking them to a useless site?
Even your site will lose visitors if your link partners don't
have good content.
Think: quality over quantity when choosing link partners. But
with the Internet changing every day, how sure are you that your
link partners can be with you for the long term?
2. Some sites don't display links properly.
Sadly, some sites will not even display your link at all,
despite their promise. And even if they do, your link will not
be prominent enough for visitors to see it and visit your site.
So how can you check if your affiliates are displaying your
link? All you have to do is visit their website at least once
every month ? a tall order if you're thinking of reciprocal
linking with at least a hundred sites to get word out on you.
3. Some sites look for link partners, not visitors
Some sites are designed in such a way that they become famous
because they have many link partners ? but not enough content to
help visitors out. Sometimes, what results are link partners
visiting each other's sites and closing their club around their
circle of websites.
What happens to your site, then? It gets a lot of visits ? from
your link partners, who already know about you.
4. Some sites do not have well organized links pages
In an effort to boost popularity, some webmasters can be
reckless and simply list all their affiliate sites on their
links page. Their random collection can give visitors a
headache.
If sites, including yours, have categorized links, they will
attract more traffic and increase the site's popularity
naturally. Again, sadly, this is not true for most sites on the
Internet, and reciprocal linking with them will befuddle more
than benefit visitors.
So how can you avoid these pitfalls? Visit your link partners
regularly, and choose a few good ones firsthand.
Most importantly, rely on other methods to get word out on your
website. Besides, you'll never know who you're linking with.
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