31/10: SEO and Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links were a great way to promote your web site. Yes that is in the past tence. Reciprocal linking was a great way to get your site linked to by many other web sites, in turn increasing your link popularity.
Link popularity is a great way of promoting your site in the search engines and the more powerful in-bound links you have to your web site the better. Apart from the search engines taking these in-bound links into account, you would also receive traffic directly from thos other web sites.
The problem is that link popularity is supposed to be naturally gained. That is, the in-bound links you receive to your web site are supposed to be created by the owner of these other web sites, not by you. Reciprocal link campaigns are created by you (the web site owner) and the links created are not naturally created. This was picked up by the major search engines and as a result, reciprocal links are no longer a powerful way of producing link popularity.
This is not to say that reciprocal link programs are a waste of time, they're not. A successful link campaign would consist of reciprocal and one way links. That is, you need to encourage people to link to your web site without having to ALWAYS link back to them.
There are many ways that this can be achieved. One very popular way is to put a browser detector script on your web site, then depending on the browser type, present a bookmark link/favourites link to the user.
Another way is to add RSS to your web site. This will allow people to syndicate your web site content, thus producing links back to your web site.
There are many other ways to produce one way in-bound links to your web site, but don't put all your eggs in one basket and produce soley reciprocal links.
Link popularity is a great way of promoting your site in the search engines and the more powerful in-bound links you have to your web site the better. Apart from the search engines taking these in-bound links into account, you would also receive traffic directly from thos other web sites.
The problem is that link popularity is supposed to be naturally gained. That is, the in-bound links you receive to your web site are supposed to be created by the owner of these other web sites, not by you. Reciprocal link campaigns are created by you (the web site owner) and the links created are not naturally created. This was picked up by the major search engines and as a result, reciprocal links are no longer a powerful way of producing link popularity.
This is not to say that reciprocal link programs are a waste of time, they're not. A successful link campaign would consist of reciprocal and one way links. That is, you need to encourage people to link to your web site without having to ALWAYS link back to them.
There are many ways that this can be achieved. One very popular way is to put a browser detector script on your web site, then depending on the browser type, present a bookmark link/favourites link to the user.
Another way is to add RSS to your web site. This will allow people to syndicate your web site content, thus producing links back to your web site.
There are many other ways to produce one way in-bound links to your web site, but don't put all your eggs in one basket and produce soley reciprocal links.
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