Many webmasters treat their reciprocal link exchange program as a means to increase link popularity and search engine ranking only. Usually, they request link exchange, and bury their link page in some nearly invisible places. E.g. At the bottom of your homepage, and use a link called "links" with font size =1.
I can say your link exchange program cannot gain you any benefit by using the above method.
Actually, reciprocal link exchange should not be used to manipulate search engine rankings as search engines can detect it and punish you. Instead, you should regard it as another alternative way to drive website traffic and build business relationship. Webmasters may realize that their traffic is too dependent on search engines; however, their algorithm is not disclosing to public and changing
too fast. You just feel that it is too difficult to keep abreast with the changes.
Therefore, you want to build more traffic generation systems. In addition to email marketing, affiliate marketing, reciprocal link exchange is another means.
Actually, you should manage your reciprocal link exchange seriously. The main purpose is to drive website traffic.
As a by-product, it may increase the link popularity and search engine ranking.
To run a good reciprocal link exchange, it takes some effort. Link building does not happen over night. However, it can drive you steadily increasing website traffic. They are free and you don't need to pay for every click. So, you can regard it as a low cost traffic generation system that drive visitors to your site.
If 100 reciprocal links can drive you 10 unique visitors per day, 500 reciprocal links can drive you 50 unique visitors daily. It converts to 1,500 unique visitors monthly or 18,000 extra unique visitors every year should you implement reciprocal link building.
To you, it means thousands dollars. E.g. If you purchase these traffic from pay per click search engines e.g. Overture.com, you may pay, US$18,000 per year for 18,000 clicks. It is not uncommon that each click worths US$1. In some highly competitive industry, each click in Overture.com means US$4.5 or above.
Not to mention you can convert a certain percentage of 18,000 visitors you drive from reciprocal links to your customers. So, it can mean you gain another thousand dollars through building your reciprocal links.
To make sure your reciprocal links can drive quality traffic, I share some suggestions here:
A. Decide Which Websites to Exchange Links With
1. Relevant Sites
If your site is targeting for some specific niche, not every website out there that does link exchanges is right for you. You want to exchange links with a website that will bring targeted traffic (visitors/customers that are interested in what you have to offer).
Exchanging links with websites that have similar or complimentary themes or topics, should produce the best targeted traffic.
2. Suitable Sites
You should choose websites that do not bury their link pages to some "invisible" place. They cannot help you drive traffic.
B. Politely ask for link exchange can do you good
Once you find a website to exchange links, send the webmaster a personal email and give them a reciprocal link first. In the email, state your:
- name,
- your URL
- where their link is located on your website
- what you like about their site and
- why it would be mutually beneficial to exchange links
Try not to use "pre-made emails". Show the webmaster that you actually visited their website and you know what you are talking about. Sending blind, bulk emails out is not a good idea.
C. Manage Link Exchange in Timely Fashion
If you request a link exchange with other webmasters, you should firstly link their sites first. On the other hand, if you accept a link exchange request, promptly put their links on your sites. Otherwise, you may just regarded as a link cheater, or not respect your link partners.
After you make the reciprocal link, email your link partners it is done and point them to the respective URL. In case you reject a link exchange request, you may send a courtesy email to explain the reason. Through these email communication, you may establish good business relationship with your link partners and is beneficial to establishing other business partnership.
D. Periodically Check If Your Link Partners Are Still Linking to You
Granted, most of the link partners are honest guys but NOT all. So, you'd better check it. Sometimes, people may just mistakenly remove your links. Hence, if you find your link partners took off your site, send them a courtesy email and request them to re-link to your site.
E. Suggest Text for Linking to You Carefully
If someone is willing to link to you but use some inappropriate text to describe your site, it may do you more harm! It affects whether a visitor will click the link and go to your site, affects your branding, and affects how readers perceive your site!! So, you may suggest the text to your link partners.
F. Organize Your Link Directory
To make your link directory as a useful resource to your site visitors and attract more link exchange request from other webmasters, organize your link into categorized directory. You can build many categories but don't build too many sub-categories. Visitors is less likely to visit web pages in "deeper" position, and "deeper" web pages will get lower search engine ranking. To attract high quality link partners, make your categorized directory flat instead of a tall structure.