Reciprocal Links - how important are they

Reciprocal Links - How important are they
In my opinion reciprocal links are second only to search engines as a way to get traffic to ones site.

Reciprocal links are links with other sites, which are generally related to the theme of your website. The concept is simple you link to site, and that sites webmaster returns the favour and links back to your site. For some reason or another you always receive a lot more traffic from sites, then you give out.

This method of traffic building is very important and its free, its simply a matter of contacting the right webmasters and getting the right links. However a full blown 'link-hunt' can be time consuming but the benefits it can bring are huge. Among them are:

Highly targeted visitors

Better search engine rankings

The visitors that come from related websites are highly targeted and you have a much better chance of selling them your product or service, because they have come to your site through a link on a related website you know they are interested in your sites theme, otherwise they wouldn't be on a site that is linking to you and furthermore they definitely wouldn't click through if they weren't interested. So these are prime prospects for your product or service and best of all you don't have to pay for a single one.

Also it is worth telling you that it is very unlikely that once a link is up on someone's site that it will be taken down. This means that once a link is up, chances are it will be sending you free visitors for its lifetime, free visitors = free sales = more profit.

Reciprocal linking is my personal favorite form of marketing, even though a good Search Engine campaign will bring in much more traffic than any number of links can. I say this because it's ideal for sites just starting out as you can see the visitors (AND SALES) coming in within days of contacting webmasters for links. Especially if you can secure any high traffic links.

Also apart from getting visitors from the linking site itself, more recently some major search engines are using the number of links to a site as an important factor in establishing a sites relevancy. The idea behind this is that the more links a site has to more valuable it must be. Also this method of using the number of links as a relevancy factor helps the search engines defeat gateway/doorway pages. Why would anyone link to 'bare-bones' keyword filled doorway page? - Simple answer - they wouldn't. And the search engines know this.

Google is the most prominent of the big boys to use this method, and it has brought me a lot of visitors to my hobby site. Hobby site? you may ask. Well you may be interested to read that I am also the webmaster of www.irishboxingnews.com and have been for 2+ years.

The last time I checked on Altavista I had 169 sites linking to Irish Boxing News.com, and I am ranked number 3 on Google for the search term 'boxing news' . I get about 25 - 40 visitors a day from Google for this search term alone.

Before Google introduced the number of links to a site as a relevancy factor I wasn't even in the top 20, now however because I have so many quality sites linking to Irish Boxing News.com the googlebot feels I deserve position 3.

More search engines are likely to come around to this method of ranking as Google has shown with its tremendous growth that its a very effective method of establishing relevancy.

So hopefully you can see why reciprocal linking is so important to any 'serious' webmasters. My Irish Boxing News.com site gets about 150 visitors a day, not bad for a site without a budget plus it's a niche information site, and doesn't have broad appeal, anyway most of them come from search engines but about 50-60 come from links on other sites. Just Multiply them numbers by 4 or 5 for a site with mass appeal like an Internet Marketing site and you can really start to see the power of developing links with other sites.
BOTTOM LINE - GET LINKING NOW