Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Investigating Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is the Web’s equivalent of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The way it works is this: You put in a link on your page to another Web site, and the other Web site returns the favor by putting in a link to yours. Even directly competing sites can benefit from linking to one another, just as two restaurants can happily exist side by side.

Finding sites to link to

So whom do you want to link with? Well, the simple answer is “anybody and everybody.” The smart answer, though, is “the best and most popular sites in my category.” What’s best is a matter of opinion, but it’s pretty easy to find the most popular ones, and you can use this technique to piggyback on their success.

What you need to do is to spend some time working the search engines. Here’s the drill:

1.	Enter the keywords you think people would use to find your site.
2.	Follow the links in the results to the other sites that are similar to your own. All search engines will return some poor responses, so don’t automatically assume that all the results would be good reciprocal link sources for your Web site. Use your own judgment.
3.	Look for an e-mail link to the site’s owner. Typically, you can find this type of link at the bottom of the page, but it may be anywhere.
4.	Click the e-mail link and send the site’s Webmaster a message politely suggesting that you ...