Submitting to the search engines can get your site indexed quickly, but without a few incoming links your site may not stay indexed. Reciprocal links help keep your site indexed for the long term.

When it comes to Web sites, networking isn’t just a software term. Social networking is an important part of optimizing your Web site. Here’s how reciprocal linking works. You add links to other companies on your Web site — and in turn ask those sites to add links to your site. Building the right kind of links to your site improves your search-engine results.

Search engines love links — especially links from other sites. A link to your site from another site indicates to the search engine that your site is valuable to someone else; search engines see this as a sign of quality. The more quality links you have to your site, the higher your placement is with the search engines.

Unfortunately, cultivating links to your site can be difficult. Talk to everyone
you know who has a site. Ask friends, family, suppliers, and business associates. Ask your customers. It’s best if the site is somehow related to yours, but any link (within reason) helps.

If you’re really serious about creating reciprocal links, you might consider
adding a link page to your Web site. That way potential link partners see
exactly where you’ll place their links.

Here are a few tips that might make your site a bit more desirable to other
sites. The best part about building great content is that some sites might link to your site without your even having to ask:

• Add informative content: Your site should offer something of value to
  entice other sites to link to yours. As fascinating as you might find your own products and services to be, that may not enough to keep visitors’ attention; get busy creating some informative content that they might use. Add how-to articles, product reviews, and general tips related to your industry. Try to teach without selling. If you just can’t get into writing, consider linking to informative articles that you’ve found elsewhere on the Internet.
• Offer a freebie or two: Nothing entices visitors to your site faster than
  free stuff. Add a free tool or download.
• Find good tie-ins to your industry: It’s good business to figure out all the different types of sites that could potentially trade links with you. Focus on sites that are related to your target market. For example, if you sell real estate you might trade links with a mortgage company, title company, and real estate attorney. Include decorating tips and link to an interior decorator.
• Link to quality sites: Make sure the sites with which you are going to reciprocate are indexed. Better yet, see if they show up relatively high on the search engines. The higher a page appears, the better. Try to affiliate your site with sites that have pages ranked as high as (or higher than) your own.
• Link to sites that already link to other sites: The span of your Web site expands proportionately if you link to sites that are already taking advantage of reciprocal linking to other sites.

After you set up reciprocal links on your Web site to other sites, check those other sites and make sure that links to your site appear on them. Hopefully, those people who said they would add links to your site have actually added them, but sometimes people forget!

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