Is Reciprocal Link Exchange Dead?

The sun seems to be setting on the world of reciprocal link exchange. Sites that major on that may have to switch to a new paradigm, or go down like the titanic.

The major search engines seem to frown at reciprocal link exchanges, and gradually it is becoming obvious that chasing reciprocal links for the purpose of enhancing search engine rankings is becoming a dying art.

It was pretty contrived while it lasted. You set up a link page, and dump links there. Some webmasters did not bother to categorize the links. On the same page, you will find viagra, mortgage finance, debt consolidation, travel agency, Chinese porcelain, psychics and all the work. Visitors hardly visit such link farms.

Reciprocal link exchanges, as practiced by most webmasters and link exchanges were attempts to artificially inflate link popularity. The interest of the visitor is hardly reckoned with in the transaction. What webmasters look for are Alexa rankings and Google Page Rank of the sites they want to exchange links with. They are ready to trade links with a non-English sites. They know nobody goes there, except search engine spiders. Some webmasters block out search engine spiders, so as to fool the engines to believe all they have are one way links.

Ultimately, human visitors determine the success or failure of a site and not search engine spiders. Humans deliver the most required response, be it placing an order, clicking through to your affiliate merchant site, subscribe to your newsletter or whatever. Search engine spiders don't do that. If you manage to trick yourself into top search engine rankings, your fifteen minutes of fame will not do much to your bottom line. You will get lots of visitors if you show up tops in Google (Coming out tops in MSN and Yahoo does not necessarily translate to a quantum leap in traffic). If your site does not hold visitors, more visitors makes not difference, the returns will be close to zero. Like a high street shop, if all your visitors are window shoppers, you will soon be out of business.

To make matters more interesting, search engines figure out how long visitors stay on your site. How do they figure this out? Simple: let's say you show up number two in Yahoo! for ezine marketing. A visitor clicks through to your site. Fifteen seconds later, the guy is back to the same Yahoo! results pages to check out number three site listed. Look at it this way; Yahoo! sends a visitor to your site, and the visitor is back in a jiffy. It means your site does not have the content he is looking for. Imagine the visitor comes back an hour later. It means the site was useful, but he still needs more. What if he does not come back? This means he has found what he is looking for. Effectively, your visitors are giving feedback to Yahoo! If this happens over and over again (15 seconds visits), this is an indictment on your site. It spells you don’t have valuable enough content to belong in the top ranks. Check out your ranking at the next database update. Sure enough, your site drops off the radar. The party is over. You may be tempted to go and try new tricks. The vicious cycle continues.

Reciprocal link exchange is not dead, if you provide links for the benefit of your visitors. Linking for the sake of visitors is a win-win scenario. You have a page that delivers valuable content, and at the end, you list recommended sites that deals extensively on the subject matter. Your visitor gobbles up your content, clicks through to your recommended site, and finds more valuable content. In summary, he finds what he is looking for. You send targeted traffic to your link partner, in return he sends targeted traffic to you. You both win, the surfer wins and the search engine wins, by delivery relevant results to the searcher. Since you help the search engine to win, they reward you with high rankings.

Surfers are looking for content. Search engines are looking for good content sites to serve up to surfers when they key in their search phrases. Since search engines cannot use humans to review all the sites in their index to rank them according to keywords, they use algorithms. Webmasters have tried to beat the algorithms, so that they come out tops in search engine results pages (SERPS) whether they have good content or not.

If the search engines continue serving non-relevant, low content or keyword stuffed pages that look like gibberish to the human eye over and over again, they will soon be out of business. To stay in business, they have to develop complex algorithms that are always a step ahead of smart webmasters who are more interested in high rankings than good content.

If you have very good content, other sites will link to you. You become an asset to them, since you are helping them deliver good content to their visitors. I have linked to sites without asking for a return link.

Again, you can exchange one way links with other sites. For this to happen, one of the webmasters has to own two good sites with a relevant theme. The down side to this is that this too can be abused. Webmasters can exchange one way links for the sake of the engines, and not visitors.

You have to keep in mind that by linking to a site, you are endorsing that site. If you endorse a poor quality site, your visitors and the search engines will penalize you for poor judgement. You are better of with a few high quality links than a quantum of low quality links.

The bottom line is for webmasters to mind their business, literally. Focus on building your online business. If you are building a content site, focus on delivering good unique content. Provide links in the appropriate content pages to resources you'd be proud to recommend to your visitors. Keep building your business, and satisfying your visitors. The engines will eventually take notice, and reward you with high rankings for being a useful partner in their business model.

Anytime you want to exchange links, stop and think, if there were no engines, would you go ahead with the link swap?

Usiere Uko is the webmaster of the Financial Freedom Inspiration website and editor of the monthly Financial Freedom Inspiration Newsletter, a free ezine to inspire you to exit the rat race and fulfill your God given dreams. To subscribe or visit the site, please click on the URL below. http://www.financial-freedom-inspiration.com

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7 Simple Steps to Spy on Your Online Competition and Acheive a High Page Rank

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My Grandfather ran a small Grocery Store and when you would ask him a Question about his Business he would laugh and reply does Macy's Tell Gimbel's. (At the Time Gimbel's was a major Competitor of Macy's in the New York Department Store Market.) Well if Macy's were on the Internet back then they could be telling Gimbel's a lot. If Gimbel's knew which tool's to use and what steps to take to 'spy' on Macy's.

All Examples are based on the search term 'buckwheat pillows' I do not sell 'buckwheat pillows', but I did recently order some online.

1 - Who is Number 1 for the Best Keyword.

Go to Yahoo, MSN and Google Type in "buckwheat pillows" see who your Top competitors are. You may want to look at the top 5 or 10 for results for Yahoo, MSN and Google, Do they overlap, Is someone number 1 in all 3 Searches or are they different. Which result Appears most often in the Top 3, the Top 5, the Top 10. Pick one of your Top competitors and see what else you can learn. Let's usehttp://www.l-oma.com/ for this example.

2 - What Keywords does usehttp://www.l-oma.com/ and how often.

The Meta Tag Analyzer tool will tell you which keywords appear on these pages and how often. Just go tohttp://ewguru.com/tagtool and type inhttp://www.l-oma.com and click submit. You will get a Report. The Top of the Report contains information on the Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags we will use these later now scroll down until you see the Report Heading [The Keywords Found on Page]

This Heading tells you the Keyword Density for the Keywords and Keyword Phrases on this Page. You will notice the Keyword 'Pillows' appears 3.76%, 'Buckwheat' 3.29% and 'Pillow' 1.88%. You will also see that the Keyword Phrase 'buckwheat pillows' appears 2,88%. A Keyword density of about 3% is just about right for your Target Keywords and Phrases.

Now Scroll up a little you will see the Heading [Keywords found in the IMG Alt tags] The Alt tag of an image is the text a user sees when the Image can't be displayed. In this case they are not using Alt Tags. They could improve slightly by adding Alt Tags to their Images. Maybe for the Pillow they could place 'Enjoy this Comfortable Buck Wheat Pillow' in the Alt Tag

Scroll up a little more and you will see the Heading [Keywords found in the Anchor tags] This tells which Keywords are being used with there Hyper Links. Keywords in the Anchor can help your ranking. Perhaps they could have said 'Order Buckwheat Pillows' instead of just 'order'.

3 - Title Meta Tag

Let's keep working with the Report from the tagtool. Scroll up the page a little and you will see [Meta tags analysis]. and [Meta tags report for:http://www.l-oma.com/index.htm] The First Entry under Both these Headings is Title. This is the Title that appears between the title and /title HTML Tags in the Header. The Report tells you the actual title is 'Quality Buckwheat Pillows Handcrafted in Maine by L-OMA'

The 2nd Heading tells you The Title relevancy to page content is 89%. Yahoo, Google and MSN like this to be fairly accurate. 89% is pretty Good 95% or higher is Ideal. Seehttp://ewguru.com/hbiz/perfectmatch.html for a Quick Lesson on how to get that number to 95% or Greater

4 - Description Meta Tag

The Next Entry under [Meta tags analysis] and [Meta tags report] is Description. Think of this as a Summary of what is contained on the Page. This is also what Google, Yahoo and MSN Display when you're listing appears. Ideally the Description should match perfectly with what is on the Page, in this Example this tool won't measure the Description because it is over 200 Characters Google, MSN and Yahoo use between 150 and 200 characters in there Listing for this result.

Look over there Description it uses the Keyword Phrase 'Buckwheat pillows' 3 Times. It uses the Company Name L-OMA. Notice too that it uses lots of word like Neck, Spine and sleeping that appear in the Keyword Density Report. The Description is Excellent as it is aims squarely at their target Market.

5 - Keywords Meta Tag

Keywords is the 3rd Row in both the [Meta tags analysis]. [Meta tags report]. You get to see the actual Keywords they want to be indexed under and how well this page Matches. They got an 84% match which means out of the 19 Keywords they chose only 84% or about 16 Appear on this Page. Look at their Keyword List

[buckwheat pillow, loma buckwheat pillow, l-oma, back pain, pillow, headache, snoring, neck pain, migraine headache, sleep apnea, tension, muscle pain, stress, buckwheat hull, Maine]

You may want to type in some of their Keywords into Yahoo, MSN and Google and see how they did for those keywords and phrases.

6 - Link Tool (http://ewguru.com/linktool)

To Find out a Little more abouthttp://www.l-oma.com go to the Link tool and Type inhttp://www.l-oma.com and then click. You will Notice that they have 16 Backwards links from Google, 312 from Yahoo and 3 from MSN. Click on 312 under Yahoo and you get to see who is linking to them. Likewise click on 16 under google and 3 under MSN to see who they list as Back Links. Can you get links from these web sites too.

7 - What Other Keywords to use

The Keyword Suggestion Tool is another Source of Fantastic Information. (http://ewguru.com/kw-suggestion) Just Type in your Keywords 'buckwheat pillows' and find out other Keywords you can use.

Go back through the steps with these new keywords and see what else you can learn. You may want to target some of the Less Popular Keywords first to get your own High Page Rank.

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Get listed at DMOZ

When you are deciding on the major search engine directories that you want your website to be listed in, you should not overlook one of the most important ones: the DMOZ (short form for Directory Mozilla). DMOZ is just another name for the Open Directory Project, one of the human-powered submission directories. The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) was designed and is currently operated by a volunteer group of web editors and reviewers.

It will not cost you a dime to get listed on DMOZ but before you submit your website to the Open Directory Project for review, you will need to be certain it is developed with DMOZ standards in mind. You will need to go through all of your web pages to make sure that your website is elegant and professional.

Your website design should be already completed at the time you make the submission. That means that the design of every single web page should be finished. Unfinished websites will be rejected. Also make sure that your website contains valuable and relevant information or your website will get rejected.

One of the benefits of being listed with the Open Directory Project is that your website will sooner or later appear in other search engines like Google and Yahoo. This happens because the DMOZ listings are used by numerous search engines and directories, including Google.

The submission process is relatively uncomplicated. Your first step is to visit the website of Open Directory Project:http://www.dmoz.org. You will be able to select a category and subcategories for your website and add your website’s URL. Make sure that you selected the correct category and subcategory. Incorrect selection may result in longer waiting period or rejection. Also read and follow the provided instructions and requirements very carefully

The title and description that you submit should be carefully prepared and reviewed to make sure they accurately describe the content and the main theme of your website. If DMOZ editors will disagree with your description or title, they can either change it or completely reject your website.

It may take some time (sometimes 6 months or more ...) before your website will show up in the Open Directory Project. However, do not resubmit your website during the waiting period as this can only result in a longer delay or get your website rejected. Be patient and regularly check the status of your submission by doing the search on DMOZ. If your website does not get listed for a long period of time or gets rejectedComputer Technology Articles, you can also check on the status of the submission or the reasons for the rejection by contacting the editors for the subcategory that you selected.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jakob Jelling is the founder ofhttp://www.centernet.dk. Visit his website for the latest info on search engine optimization.