Reciprocal linking is an effective, free way to get more visitors to your website. Exchanging links with other webmasters can help you in two ways.
Firstly, by getting your link displayed on other websites you are increasing
number of paths leading back to your your own site. This in turn will increase number of visitors.
Secondly, exchanging links will increase chances of getting your web page ranked more highly in results returned by search engines.
The reason for this is that for most search engines, number of links pointing to a site plays a huge part in determining where that site ranks. Why? Well, wouldn't you be more likely to visit a place that had been recommended to you by a friend? The same reasoning applies to search engine positioning.
A link from site A to site B is like a vote for site B. The more votes that site B gets, higher it is regarded by search engines.
However, quantity is not everything! A link carries more weight if it is from a high quality site - in same way that a recommendation from a trusted friend would be taken more seriously than a recommendation from a casual acquaintance.
If you have been reading up on subject of search engine positioning, you may be familiar with term "PR", or "Page Rank". Page Rank is Google's way of measuring "importance" of a web page. In simple terms PR is a number between 1 and 10 and can be viewed by downloading Google toolbar.
It is easy to become hung up on or obsessed by page rank, but my advice is to try to take your focus away from that PageRank icon on Google toolbar and focus your efforts instead on building up a good set of reciprocal links. If you do this well, PR and search engine rankings will come.
So, how do you start reciprocal linking?
The first step is to find other sites that you want to link to. Use search engines and links from other websites to find sites that complement your own and try to request links from sites that you think would interest your visitors.
You can find some linking directory resources to help you with your searching on my Link Exchange Directories and Tools Page.
You may have been recommended to avoid linking with your direct competitors. Whether you do this or not is entirely up to you - main disadvantage of doing this is chance of losing business, whereas advantage is extra traffic that you will gain by doing so.
