Reciprocal Linking And Link Baiting For Internet Marketing Newbies

Getting back links to your website and your blog is one of the best ways of building traffic and getting an audience for your Internet business.

But what is the best way of getting those links back to your site?

A while back one of the most popular ways of doing that was known as reciprocal linking. A whole industry grew up around this concept. Unfortunately, many people got carried away with the concept and posted numerous reciprocal links that were not relevant to the theme of their website or did nothing to enhance the experience of the website user.

Here's what Matt Cutts of Google had to say on the subject on a blog post in May 2007:

"Reciprocal links by themselves aren't automatically bad, but we've communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking." (Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2007/05/page/2/)

It seems that Google has decided to downgrade reciprocal links as a factor in page rank. This does not mean that you should stop all reciprocal links. For example if you exchange links with a business partner, that link will most likely enhance the quality of your and your partner's website and should not be considered something about Google will penalize you for.

What I would advise, however, is that you switch away from using reciprocal linking as a key aspect of your Internet marketing campaign and try to generate one-way links instead.

One way links are considered to have much more value, because they are perceived to have been voluntarily given by the linking website owner.

That does not mean that the website owner himself places all the links directly on his site. For example a forum or an article marketing directory will allow contributors to include a link back to their website in a signature file at the foot of their article or forum post.

Another method of generating backlinks is through a process called link baiting. Link baiting is an especially attractive strategy because it relies upon the creativity of the blogger or website developer. If you can, inject some wit, humour, personality and original insight into your writing and get into the habit of bookmarking your blog posts and website articles. That will make it more likely for your article to be picked up and commented on by somebody else. Other bloggers are always looking out for good stuff to comment on and will happily link out to your story. In other words, your article contains some good debate that attracted other bloggers and Webmasters to it like fish to a worm wriggling on a hook.

Look out for a special angle or insight on something that may be of interest to others. Becomes a unique source of information and you will have some powerful link baiting material.

Another popular link baiting method is to make a list of resources or a list of useful websites. People love to find lists of good resources. You could make a table with the resources in one column and some comments about them in another to draw people to your webpage.

This brings us to another important point about link baiting. Do not be afraid to link out to good quality websites. It is what the best bloggers do all the time. By linking out, you are making your visitors Internet experience that much more valuable. That in turn increases the perceived value of your blog or website. By giving away good links without worrying about reciprocity or loss of traffic, you will turn your site into a resource that attracts many more links to it. Oh, and you needn't worry if some of those links are "reciprocal", they will probably cut the mustard with Matt Cutts.