Reason No. 3 - You Are Spending More Time On Other People's Websites Than Your Own

If you spend a lot of your time researching and creating reciprocal links you'd better make sure that your website is perfect. Remember - all that time you're spending developing reciprocal links could be spent adding new content to your website, sending out an up to date newsletter to your mailing list or even sitting down and writing out goals for your website.

If you spend all time on improving your website, adding great content, providing excellent service, keeping it up to date, testing different headlines and homepage layouts INSTEAD of spending time building links guess what? You will magically find that more people link to you anyway!

In fact - your website will become such a great resource because of all time you're dedicating to it that people will go OUT OF THEIR WAY to link to you! How ironic is that?!

You go hunting for links and your site suffers and therefore hardly anybody links to you. You spend time on making your website THE BEST IT CAN BE and everyone starts linking to you as, shock horror, you have a brilliant website that is worth referring to..

Reason No. 4 - You Don't Have A Multi-Million Dollar Budget To Beat The Boffins

Those white-cloaked geeks over at Google towers and like have millions of dollars at their disposal to create latest technology that can sniff out merest whiff of dodginess when it comes to link swapping.

If they think something is suspect you might get penalised. First you started to see sites that used same phrase for their inbound links get penalised. Then it was sites that engaged with link farms. Who knows what's next?

Ultimately you can bet your bottom dollar that search engines will change their tack with reciprocal links and their importance - some of them are already starting to look at words that appear before and after each link to make sure it is on a relevant page and not just created as part of a reciprocal linking deal.

It's a risky game we're all playing and my money's on guys with white coats and millions of dollars..

Reason No. 5 - You Are The Weakest Link, Goodbye!

When push comes to shove this whole 'game' of website marketing is about balance.

Imagine you are a tightrope walker. Fifty metres beneath you is a huge vat of boiling hot lava. To help you across rope from podium of "website launch" to podium of "website success" you get a balancing rod.

Spending too much time and effort on reciprocal link building is like having a large sack on one end of rod. This sack has an elephant in it. The elephant is wearing boots. Made from concrete. Get picture?

Michael Cheney Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM

Michael Cheney is the Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM:

"High five Michael! Your bible is superb! The world needs to read it and learn from it." - Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of "Guerrilla Marketing"

When search engine robots look at your site, one of criteria for ranking you is your in-going and out-going links. However, when looking at that they also look at site you're linking with. If it is a link farm, they penalize your site for linking with it. These robots have become much more intelligent in their ranking criteria than you realize. Personally, I'm glad for it! Otherwise, link farms would always rank highest in all search engines and I find little to no value in those sites. Hopefully, you're like me and you want sites that hold content rather than fluff.

Now, to answer your question about how you find sites to link with. Previously, you did have to search net to find good sites, send them an email, hope that someone read your email and wait for a reply. As you can imagine, this was not only time consuming, it was tiring, unproductive and yielded few responses. Luckily, because my website was built using Site Build It! Value Exchange reciprocal linking tool was included free of charge. I am passing along this amazing and free tool to you. Trust me, you will thank me for this! I was completely blown away with how easy it was to use and amazing response I received!

How complicated and time consuming is this? Not at all! What you do is input simple information requested (URL, keywords, site description, etc) and click to register and search for value exchanges. You will receive a list of sites you matched keywords with, along with emails from members who want to exchange with you. Review your list of sites received, decide whether you'd like to exchange with them and if you do, an automatic email is sent to them, requesting a link. It's really that easy!

Check out Value Exchange today! Before I took part in Value Exchange, my site ranking was 3.7 million out of 16.5+ million total sites. In less than three weeks Ideas For Home Businesses Alexa ranking was 275 thousand and it's climbing every day. That put IFHB in top 3%! Aside from Value Exchange, I owe popularity of IFHB to Site Build It! and great resources that came along with it. Yes, I did work and am dedicated to IFHB but Site Build It! made it easier and much more enjoyable than I thought possible!

Oh! I almost forgot! Check out Site Build It! Sweepstakes for your chance to win!!!