Reciprocal Links Aren’t The Only Way To Boost Traffic

By Jeff Alderson | July 23, 2007

Most web publishers understand the value of incoming links. They can help increase traffic and boost PageRank and even search ranking. Figuring out ways to increase those incoming links along with the revenue potential they represent is what stymies many.

There are a variety of ways to generate incoming links to a website. Some work better than others, but they can all be effective to an extent.

Reciprocal linking is one method that many publishers employ. This simply involves putting another site’s link up on your page and giving them yours to do the same with. This can be done manually through e-mail conversations or there are even services that can help.

The types of services available vary greatly. There are those that can automate the entire process for your site and others. Some services just put people on track with other sites that do link swaps and still others will keep checking to make sure a link remains in place. If it goes away, these services will let you know. Which service is best really depends on how much time a publisher wants to spend on working link exchanges.

Swapping services can very much help to increase incoming links. They have a propensity to drop the ball a bit. Many of these service simply do not check to make sure links are in places where they can be easily found. There are many reports out there about links that exist on pages that cannot be jumped to from sites’ home pages and so on. A link lost in the ether won’t help a site boost traffic. To avoid this, it is often recommended that publishers check their links involved in exchanges. If they have lousy placement, contact the publisher of the offending site. If no action is taken, just remove their link from yours.

Reciprocal linking can have its perks, but its not the only way to go. Publishers have a number of other tools at their disposal for creating solid incoming links. One of the best methods, perhaps, is simply by doing what publishers do best. It all falls on content creation. The better, more interesting, more useful a site’s content happens to be, the more likely that site is to gain incoming links in a more organic, or natural way. The reality is other sites like to link to those in the field that do their jobs well.

When generating content, it’s a good idea to make sure it’s of high quality. Whether it’s a rant, a rave, a news article, an in-depth review or a humor piece, if visitors take something away from viewing the content, natural links are likely to come. Make sure content is at least search engine optimized in the title and in a few spots, but beyond that don’t let quality get sacrificed for keywords.

There are a number of other ways to boost incoming links. Some of the best ways include writing posts in forums with URL signatures included, retaining others to write blog posts about your content, running awards programs and contests and so on. The key with these ideas is to be creative and have a little fun.

There is more than one option to boost incoming links. Reciprocal programs are effective, but they aren’t the only game in town.

About the author: Jeff Alderson develops search engine optimization software. Want to quickly boost your link popularity for free? Be sure to use Ad Word Analyzer to uncover top keywords for your anchor text.

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