Reciprocal Links are a solid way to build search engine rapport, as well as a mutually beneficial relationship with another website owner. When seeking a reciprocal link, find another site in good search engine standing, ensure they use White Hat SEO practices to optimize their site, and has similar content to your site. Below is an example of how to go about determining the quality of a reciprocal link.

Article Contents:

• Assessing Keyword Competition
• Refining Keyword Selection
• Avoid Spammy Websites
• Find Websites with a Blogroll
• Do Additional Research
• Post Summary

Case Study Information:

Example Niche: golfing.
Our website: golfpro.com (lets pretend we own it.)
Our product: an membership website that teaches viewers how to improve their golf skills.

Assessing Keyword Competition at a Glance

When you plug “golfing” into Google.com you are greeted with the results below. Upon clicking on the thumbnail we provided, the image enlarges you have a more broad view of what our query returned.

Our term “golfing” has approximately five and a half million indexed pages. While it is not a staggering number in compassion to other competitive search terms, it would defiantly be difficult to rank anywhere near the first few pages. This is where Keyword Selection and the Long Tail come into play.

The first couple of search results are from [search engine] trusted sites such was wikipedia.org and golf.com. The aforementioned sites are robust and rank high in search engine like Google for a wide span of terms and definitions. Having powerful, influential, and relevant websites link to you is your primary objective; in addition to linking back to those sites to show Google or whomever that there is a mutually beneficial bond.

Unfortunately, getting a link back from one of the previously mentioned sites would be next to impossible. Wikipedia.org is academic in nature, if your page/site is not written like a case study, is not authoritative, and is not from a highly reputable author you will not receive a Backlink. On the other side of the coin, Golf.com is operated by the Turner-SI Digital Network; a commercial venture which would more than likely not link to you unless you are offering a product or service that they will profit from.

Refining Keyword Selection

Seeing that our keyword “golfing” is weak and targets the whole niche, we need to develop an Action Phrase. That is, a phrase that gets more personal,catches the attention of an even smaller group, and helps further our cause. For this we are going to use “improve golf swing”. After typing in the phrase we see that there are really no friendly sites such as blogs; which are operated by individuals, and therefore more likely to link back upon request. Lets try our action phrase with the word “blog” appended to it. As you can see in the image below our search results for “improve golf swing blog” are more favorable.

Avoid Spammy Websites

Delving deeper, we see our search results return several “relevant” sites. The first couple of websites appear harmless enough, only upon further investigation do we see that the first site ranked “golf–swing.blogspot.com” uses a practice called Keyword Stuffing. Keyword stuffing was a popular tactic used by Blog Farms, you can get the general overview of Blog Farms at smartblogtips.com. Since the release of Google’s Panda Update several of these spammy website have been penalized and lost their positions in the search engines, whoever this site does not appear to have been effected; yet.

Breaking the above image down you can see on the right hand side – marked in red – that the most recent posts are all titled “Golf Swing”. All of the post titles – marked in green – utilize the keyword phrase “Golf Swing” and finally you see the post author, in addition to all of the post content saturated with the keyword phrase “Golf Swing”. All of this keyword stuffing is used in the hopes that users will click on the Google Ad-Sense Ads – marked in yellow – and the website owner will profit.

Side Note:
While it is good practice to have some Keyword Saturation – about 3% to 5% of the total article – over doing it, as in the example above will get your site severely penalized by Google. This spammy site is ranking so high is because they have utilized Black Hat SEO techniques. Often it can be frustrating to see spammers rank higher than you, but as explained by SEOmoz.org there are several positive factors that could cause spammers to rank hire than you. Stay the course; follow good White Hat SEO practices, and you will not have to worry about getting Deindexed/Sandboxed by Google.

Find Websites with a Blogroll

Blow you can see an example of a blog that has good SEO practices at first glance. You can see that the owner links to other blogs/websites – marked in red – but does not do so in a spammy manner nor does he practice keyword stuffing. The term “Golf swing” is used but does not saturate the article.

It can be observed that the author has viewer participation – marked in dark yellow – that is, users leaving comments, and resubmitting his content to Social Media sites like digg.com. Viewer participation is a good sign that viewers are finding the information they want, in addition to finding it so useful they take the time to so show their appreciation by providing feedback.

Do Additional Research

You are going to be creating a permanent link between your site and the one you select, make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a site you want to connect with. Using a couple of my favorite quick tools such as domaintools.com whois lookup we can get a quick snapshot of the author’s search engine standings.

After we navigate over to DomainTools.com, paste the domain name in the search box and click “search for domain”. When the results are returned we want to click on the “Site Profile” tab. The Site Profile tab will display the website’s title, keyword, and description relevancy, in relation to the domain name.

As you can see this author’s Relevancy Ratings are in the 80th percentile range. In order to improve the Title Relevancy for example, the author would want to change the first portion of his Title Tag – before the division – to read “Mike Pedersen Golf” instead of “Mike Pedersen Golf Blog”. Assuming the author wants to market the keyword phrase “Mike Pedersen Golf” in his SEO campaign.

Our first primary area of focus this the amount of inbound traffic the site receives monthly as well as it’s standing in relation to other websites on the internet. If you look at the “Complete Rank” section you can find the corresponding information. A rank around 600,000 is impressive, in addition to the author having about 2,300 visitors a month.

The second primary area of focus is the SEO information for the website. Quality indicators you want to look for are:

• High overall SEO score.
• Unique terms – a good indication the author has unique content.
• The majority of the images on the website make use of “alt” tags.
• A high percentage of overall links are internal.

One last free tool I enjoy is the home page analysis feature offered by aboutus.org. It will give you a quick low down on what the site is missing. For example in this instance the author is missing an H1 Tag. The use of H1 tags is crucial, the tell the search engines what your main point of the page or article is. The only other real discrepancy the website author needs to focus on is making use of the “alt” tags. Ultimately it will help his images get picked up by Google, and will increase his search engine visibility in more than one area.

I hope this article proved insightful and you can take away a few tips and tools to utilize when contemplating building your blogroll. Time for a quick recap.

Post Summary:

• Find websites in your general field to get idea of who the top dogs are, what keywords are relevant to the field, and determine what elements make those highly ranked sites quality.
• Refine your keyword selection to a phrase that is more active and engaging for readers.
• Take a moment to glace over the perspective site, do they stuff keywords? Is the content unique and useful to readers? Are the readers providing feedback?
• Find Websites that utilize a Blogroll. Does the website author have an intelligent linking strategy as well? Are the links the author links to relevant to your site as well?
• Scrutinize the SEO, traffic, and content quality of the prospective site before finalizing your decision to contact the website author to exchange links