Almost everyday, I receive emails from different webmasters / bloggers requesting for reciprocal links. At first, reading their emails were amusing but it’s been annoying lately as the number of emails increased. Considering that reciprocal link is a less effective SEO strategy that rarely works, I’m really surprised at how many bloggers and webmasters are still engaged in this SEO approach.

In my observation, most of the bloggers / webmasters involved in reciprocal links are newbies. I had the same mistake when I was starting to blog and hopefully, after reading this post, you will spare yourself from doing the same.

What’s Wrong With Reciprocal Link?

Reciprocal link is a form of exchange link where one blogger / webmaster links to another website in exchange for a link to his/her site.

Search Engines determine the page rank of a website base on the number of links pointing to it. Links pointing to a website are considered vote of confidence to the site. The higher the number of quality links, the better. Now imagine that there are two candidates running for president and they are also the only voters. If one vote for the other and vice versa, no one wins. The vote is useless. Similarly, reciprocal links don’t work because its value is depreciated.

This “I’ll link to you, if you’ll link to me” SEO approach that predates Google, is not only ineffective but is also against Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Hence, using this method to boost your website’s page rank may actually harm your site instead.

It’s also worth noting that doing reciprocal link will only consume a considerable space on your blog and will only clog your sidebar. Why don’t you just use this space for more useful and productive purposes instead.

One Way Link

If you really want to improve your site’s Google Page Rank and optimize it for search engines, you should work in building more one way link to your site instead.

One way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a Hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes “one way” in direction. - Wikipedia

There are several ways you can do to earn more one way link to your website without the need for a reciprocal link like submitting it to free directories or by leaving your comments on dofollow blogs. Or better yet, continue creating useful content and one way links will naturally build up over time.

What else do you think can be done to build more one way link to a site? Or you’re still going to use reciprocal link?

There are alot of bloggers who are still using this approach to boost their page rank and search engine ranking. Do Stumble this post or share it to others so they will know why their approach is not working, why it has done so little or why it has gotten their site banned from search engines.

Thank you for your time.

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I have been working on optimizing Blogging Mix for the search term “Blogging Tips” and so far, things are doing great. I just checked Google today and found out that Blogging Mix is on the second page of the search result for the competitive keywords “Blogging Tips”. Back in January of this year, Blogging Mix appeared on the 21st page of Google’s search result for Blogging Tips.

Although for the past two weeks, I noticed that Blogging Mix’s position for the keywords “Blogging Tips” was unstable. Sometimes, GarryConn.com and QuickOnlineTips.com are ranked higher than Blogging Mix. I also observed that Blogging Mix in some days appears on the 3rd page.

Late last year, I tried optimizing Blogging Mix for the less competitive keywords “Tips For Bloggers”. The search engine optimization techniques I’ve implemented worked as I managed to climb from page 49 of Google’s search result page to page 1. This was an easy task considering that there are a few people optimizing the same keywords. Unfortunately, since “Tips For Bloggers” is not really well-searched, I didn’t receive much traffic from it. I then decided to optimize my blog for the more competitive search term… Blogging Tips.

I have been very clear from the start that I assume no authortiy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization but all tips I share related to SEO have been personally tested by myself and have been proven to work. Here are the SEO techniques that I’ve used to optimize Blogging Mix for the search term “Blogging Tips”.

Use your target keywords in your title tag. If you are deciding on a domain name, use your target keywords.

Keywords should appear on the specific page you are optimizing for search engines. In case you haven’t noticed, the keywords Blogging Tips appear several times in Blogging Mix’s homepage. Doing this has tremendously improved my ranking for the search term Blogging Tips.

Build more links to the page you are optimizing for your target keywords. Use your target keywords as an Anchor Text. Here are a few things you can do to build more links to your blog and at the same time allows you to use your target keywords.

• Leave comments on DoFollow blogs using your target keywords as anchor text.
• Submit to directories. Again, using your target keywords as anchor text.

There are more tips I would like to share to you guys but I’ll have to leave you with these three until I have proven that they work. Some of these blogging tips are regarded as unethical and some are considered ineffective. I’ll keep you updated about this experiment as soon as I get some results.

In the coming posts, I’ll be writing a comprehensive article about the tips and strategies I used to optimize Blogging Mix for the search term Blogging Tips. You might want to consider SUBSCRIBING TO MY FEED in order not to miss any post.

Thank you for your time. Feel free to share your search engine optimization tips in the comment. :D 

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