Organic SEO - Reciprocal Linking

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites became an important part of the search engine optimization process thanks to the link popularity algorithm PageRank employed by Google, which ranks websites for relevancy dependent on the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link.

Three way linking is a special kind of reciprocal linking. In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites. An alternative to the automated linking is a link exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.

Reciprocal links help you in two ways:

1. They increase your web site traffic, from people who click on the links.
2. Reciprocal links also play a major role in boosting your rankings in search engines.

Apart from the listed steps you can also get links by arranging newsletter article exchanges with other newsletter publishers in your niche, preferably with newsletters which are archived online. Some webmasters also arrange "article swaps". You write an article to be published on their website and they write an article for your site. This gives you an in-context link, which is much more effective than a mere link on a links page.

But it is also possible to "overdo" reciprocal links. Getting good, solid, reciprocal links should be part of your links strategy, not your total marketing strategy. A huge amount of effort goes into analyzing how to add relevant external inbound links and outbound links to and from other websites so that the maximum traffic can be directed to your site. In other words, the idea is not getting lots of links from anywhere; instead, what you need is links from relevant web pages that are related to the topics you want to be searched for. Make sure the sites are of good quality and are related to the context of your site otherwise some search engines might penalize you for any artificial links.