Reciprocal Link Building- How Much Beneficial Is It?

Everything in life has its advantages and disadvantages. It depends upon you whether you tap the beneficial aspect of a thing or not. Reciprocal link building is also one of the web marketing strategies that has its pros and cons. And to be honest, to some extent, it does help. Anyone who creates a new website is showered all the attention by people to link to their websites in exchange of their linking to your website. It is for you to see whether the websites requesting you to link to them are really worth it or not. No doubt, reciprocal link exchange program forms a very essential part of SEO as search engines do consider the number and type of sites linking to your site while ranking your site.

The fact that by linking to each other, the websites are promoting and popularizing each other's site on the net is fast diminishing in it's popularity now.The reason being that search engines today have become much more smarter and efficient in discerning the links that are being received by websites. So it has become all the more important today to first check and double check the credentials of the website that is offering to link to you before you link to a fraud or banned or harmful website.

The best way to ensure that you are linking to a good, reliable and related website, ask your self the following two questions, and if the answer to them is yes, go ahead and link to the website concerned.

1. Visit the website requesting to link to your site and ask yourself whether that website is relevant to yours. If the answer is in affirmative, good. Otherwise keep in mind that linking to this site will not get you better or higher rankings.

2. Also question yourself whether it is a quality website and the kind of site to which you would like to link to or which will improve your site's popularity and reach. A negative response to this also means that you will be wasting your time linking to this website.

3. One more factor that you should consider is whether the requesting website has already added your website to it or not. If it has not done so while requesting you, it means that site is not very serious about adding your link to it and just want you to link to it.If it has already linked to your site, this means it is genuine and is seriously interested in reciprocal link exchange with you.

On the whole, there is no harm in link exchange program as long as you are linking to reliable, trustworthy and relevant websites. But do keep in mind the fact that reciprocal linking is no longer so hot an SEO technique as in the past and therefore it is advisable to treat or use it in a very restricted way.