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If you maintain a website online seek to market it, you may have been told or even offered reciprocal links. Most advertisements promise that such a venture can get more people to go to your site, raise your search engine rankings, and add to consumer and surfer interest in your product, service, or craft.

What are reciprocal links?

Reciprocal linking, as the name implies, is just exchanging links with a website selling products or services similar to yours. They will promise to post your link on their site if you promise to post their link on yours. Visitors to your site will most likely visit theirs, and visitors to their site will most likely visit yours.

Just how effective are reciprocal links? Are they all hype? Are you, as the careful web designer and developer, being told everything about them?

The aim of most reciprocal link exchangers is to increase their site's search engine rankings. However, according to a study, finding sites on search engines contributes only about 15% to a website's traffic. Reciprocal linking, then, will not get you traffic through search engine ranking.

So what purpose does reciprocal linking serve? It can get you traffic, but only and mostly if people click on your site's link from someone else's site.

How can you substantially increase your traffic through reciprocal linking? If your link appears in as many other sites as possible. This will mean that you have to list a great number of links yourself * but if you have a lot of useful links on your links page, you can actually help your site visitors, and make your website credible.

If you have a useful website with lots of links, and with other people linking back to you, you can get more people to visit your site, and keep up a good stream of Internet traffic. You can be famous in no time, right?

Reciprocal linking can help boost your Internet popularity, true, but only if done correctly. With more webmasters concerned with popularity rather than content, however, reciprocal linking with as many people as possible may actually be more to your detriment than benefit.

Why is this so?

1. Some sites do not have consistently good content

Sure, you link to many websites, and have them link back to you, but just how good are these websites?

If the website that links to you does not get updated, or does not have good content, chances are, they won't be getting any visitors, and you won't be getting any from them. And if your website links to them, and your visitors go to their site, do you think they'll love you for linking them to a useless site? Even your site will lose visitors if your link partners don't have good content.

Think: quality over quantity when choosing link partners. But with the Internet changing every day, how sure are you that your link partners can be with you for the long term?

2. Some sites don't display links properly.

Sadly, some sites will not even display your link at all, despite their promise. And even if they do, your link will not be prominent enough for visitors to see it and visit your site.

So how can you check if your affiliates are displaying your link? All you have to do is visit their website at least once every month * a tall order if you're thinking of reciprocal linking with at least a hundred sites to get word out on you.

3. Some sites look for link partners, not visitors

Some sites are designed in such a way that they become famous because they have many link partners * but not enough content to help visitors out. Sometimes, what results are link partners visiting each other's sites and closing their club around their circle of websites.

What happens to your site, then? It gets a lot of visits * from your link partners, who already know about you.

4. Some sites do not have well organized links pages

In an effort to boost popularity, some webmasters can be reckless and simply list all their affiliate sites on their links page. Their random collection can give visitors a headache.

If sites, including yours, have categorized links, they will attract more traffic and increase the site's popularity naturally. Again, sadly, this is not true for most sites on the Internet, and reciprocal linking with them will befuddle more than benefit visitors.

So how can you avoid these pitfalls? Visit your link partners regularly, and choose a few good ones firsthand.

Most importantly, rely on other methods to get word out on your website. Besides, you'll never know who you're linking with.