Reciprocal linking to promote your Kleeneze website
Over the next week or so I’m going to talk about the different active and passive methods to promote your business online. Today I’m starting with reciprocal linking.
Backlinks, or links TO your site from another, benefit you in two ways. Firstly the obvious - a user may click on the link and visit your site directly. That one is easy to understand but there is a second benefit.
Pagerank
Search engines give a ranking to every site in their index for specific keywords. If you type ‘Kleeneze’ into any search engine you will be given a list of sites in order of importance, accoring to the search engine. Now search engines are not human edited so they use a series of clues to determine which sites come out on top. One of the things they look at are the backlinks.
For example, if site A links to site B with a links such as Click here for information on Kleeneze then to the search engine site A is recommending site B. Get enough sites linking to you, and it can increase your ranking.
Google call this ‘recommendation’ factor pagerank.
All links are not created equal
A link from site A might not be as good as a link from site C. If the search engine already considers site C to be an authority on a subject (ie. has a high pagerank) then links from that site will carry more weight. The other consideration is the anchor text. That simply means the text in the link (in the example above the anchor text was “click here for information on kleeneze”). You want the anchor text to include your keywords, i.e. the words which you want to rank highly for.
To start building inbound links one simple way is to reciprocate. Find other webmasters who might be willing to trade links with you. You link to their site in return for a link back. This is a great way to get started but next time we’ll look at ways of getting one way inbound links.