Are you serious about driving traffic to your website? If you are then you should develop a linking strategy. People follow the recommendations of trusted websites. When a trusted website links to yours you suddenly get immediate attention. There are three major link strategies: 1) Purchasing text links 2) Employing a link finding service 3) Reciprocal linking.

This article focuses on the latter-reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking means that your website links to another and their website links back to yours. Its a great way to increase your ranking in search engines. Search engines use link popularity to rank sites. Therefore exchanging reciprocal links with other websites will encourage visitors to not only visit your website but bookmark it as well.

Now, this is not as simple as throwing your links all over the World Wide Web. If that were the case nearly all websites would be popular. In order to have success with reciprocal linking you should bare in mind these factors.

The quality of links should out weigh the quantity. The inbound links should come from sites that are relevant to your site content Partners should link to you from pages listing as few links as possible.

The first thing is to get people to want to link to your website. This begins with having good web content. Analyze the value of your content in relation to your competitors.

Next, you need to research websites that are worth linking to and that will drive relevant traffic to your website. Take your time to identify the directories, news sites, portals, blogs and ezines that are specific to your field. There are many software tools that you can purchase to help make this task more efficient. They will locate relevant sites, collect email addresses and even prepare letters requesting that the website link back to yours.

Arelis Reciprocal Link Solution, Links Manager and Linkpro are but a few examples. Even if you decide to use software, its important to visit the websites that these tools generate. However, good quality content is still the best way to build long term link popularity.

You can determine the websites traffic by visiting www.alexa.com you will also learn the length of time their site has been online. Going to link sites that will tell you how many sites link to them for further proof that they get a lot of traffic. One should keep in mind the following components when adopting a reciprocal linking strategy.

You will need to know the name and email address of the person who runs the site, as well you should keep a record of the date you contacted the owner of the website and the date that he or she responds.

You will also need to make note of the resulting deal. Dont be surprised if some people say no, while others will not reply at all. Some may want money for links.

If the web owner agrees to swap links, verify that the links are in place and check the website periodically for the link. Some people swap links and then pull yours. When applied correctly, reciprocal linking is an excellent strategy for getting traffic and improving your search engine ranking.