What Is a Reciprocal Link?

Simply explained, reciprocal linking is an agreement between two website owners to link to each other’s pages, at least once, which may be of advantage to both in increasing page ranking.

Some misunderstand what it means when told that links help in determining ranking, and ranking means the page shows up earlier in search returns. This translates to greater likelihood that people visit a website.

Links on a person’s website elsewhere don’t improve rank; instead people need others to link to them.

More often, people have to search for somebody else to provide that outlink to their site and one way to elicit this is through a reciprocal link.

Some people insist that webmasters check out page ranking first because a higher ranked site providing a link may more significantly improve personal page rank.

Suggestion for the personal approach is that people first create a link to the site they have targeted for a reciprocal link, and then send a note to the owner of the site suggesting a reciprocal link.

Good content, use of keywords, website layout and other features are all a part of search engine optimization . Moreover, owners really want to develop their sites to the point where links occur without having to work for them. This means building a good site with an excellent reputation.

What is a Landing Page?

Essentially web designers want to create pages that are most tailored to the needs of the person who has clicked on a link and arrived at the landing page.

These pages can be the front page of a website, or they might have other functions depending upon web page design.

For instance, clicking on a wiseGEEK link to a specific article sends the person straight to that article, and the article page itself can be called a landing page of sorts.

The goal of these pages, and really the goal of most web pages are to keep the customer or web user on the page and on the site.

For instance if a landing page brings someone to the front page of a website, it ought to have enough information to keep the customer on the site, without too much information.

Instead of arriving at a landing page that really discusses bird care, the customer arrives at the front page of a website for a pet store. This isn’t a good match; in fact it’s a very poor one. On the other hand, a landing page could be designed for the same link that takes a customer directly to a page about bird care and bird care items for sale. This is a much better match, and likelihood of the customer staying on the page is much higher.

Thus, whether the landing page is a front page or another page on the site, goal of the programmer is to make the page as specific to the link as possible.

How Do I Build Quality Backlinks?

An inbound link from an established website with high traffic and similar content is deemed to have more value than a link from an unrelated website with little traffic.

While specific strategies differ, building quality backlinks for any website should focus on gaining inbound links from websites with an eye towards relevance, authority, and timeliness; the same criteria used by search engines to rate links.

In this regard, quality is typically more important than quantity. Although the number of inbound links to a particular website factor into the ranking search engines apply, the links with the highest value are those links from websites with similar or relevant content.

For example, links between a sports news website and a sporting goods supplier would be considered more valuable than links between a sports news website and an online dating website.

Websites with high traffic and numerous inbound links are assumed by search engines to be more authoritative than a website with less traffic and fewer links.

With more inbound links, the search engines assume a website's content is of interest to a large audience and therefore assign it more authority than another website with fewer backlinks.

Older links already indexed by the search engines do not have as much value as newer links, which indicate to search engines that a particular page is still of relevant interest to readers.

Link Spamming

There are some websites and services that will charge a fee to increase the number of backlinks for a site. Some of these websites will disguise themselves as news sites or other commercial sites in order to keep search engines from diminishing the value of the backlinks. Backlink services often will engage in what is called link spamming — placing links on as many websites as possible, no matter what the purpose or quality of those websites is. For example, a computer program can randomly "crawl" the Internet automatically place links on any webpages that allow it to post a comment, even if the link has nothing to do with that webpage. Most search engines will try to prevent these types of backlinks from affecting their search result page rankings.

Link Exchanges

One way for a website owner to increase the number of backlinks that his or her site has is by creating partnerships with website owners whose sites are focused on similar topics and exchanging links. For example, someone whose website focuses on techniques for making flower arrangements might seek to partner with websites for florists, gardening stores, wedding boutiques and home décor shops. By linking to these websites on his or her site in exchange for those sites linking to his or her site, the owner of the flower arrangement website will increase the site's number of backlinks and will provide backlinks for the partner sites. Although this type of link exchange is popular among websites that focus on similar topics, it is unlikely for competing websites that focus on the same topic or have the same purpose to provide backlinks to each other.

Importance of Backlinks

Website owners often try to increase the number of visitors that their sites receive by increasing the number of backlinks to their sites. There are several ways that backlinks can be created. All of them might increase a site's traffic, simply because Internet users will have more opportunities to click on links to the site, but not all types of backlinks will improve a site's search engine ranking. This is because most search engines will evaluate the quality of the backlink based on things such as the popularity and nature of the site from which it originates. For example, a backlink from a website that exists only to provide backlinks to other sites — usually for a fee — is unlikely to improve a site's search engine ranking.

Linking

A link allows an Internet user to click on it to navigate to or open a different webpage. When the webpage that is opened is on a completely different website from the one where the link appeared, the link would be considered a backlink for that new site. The backlink might appear as a uniform resource locator (URL), also called an Internet address or web address, or it might be a word or phrase that has the link embedded. The word or phrase usually will be highlighted in some way, such as in bold type or underlined, to let the reader know that it can be clicked on to follow a link.

What Is a Backlink?

"Backlink" is a term that refers to links that point to a website or webpage from another website. This type of link also might be called an inlink or incoming link. Backlinks on other sites can increase a website's traffic. They also are tools used in search engine optimization (SEO), because the number and quality of backlinks that point to a website's often plays a role in the site's rank among search results.