Reciprocal Linking Software

If you want to rank highly in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, then you must have as many links pointing towards your site as possible. That's why I recommend article publishing.

However, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And getting links from other websites is also an option. But links from just any old site are not going to help you.

You'll need links from other sites that are in the same category as your site. For example: If you sell boats, then you need links from other boating sites. If you sell shoes, then you'll need links from other sites that manufacture or sell shoes.

While it won't hurt you to have links coming in from off-topic sites, it probably won't help you either. But if you link out to an off-topic site, it could definitely hurt your ranking!

To put it in a nutshell, probably the best links to go after are links from your competitor's sites. This is called reciprocal linking. You give your competitor a link, and he gives you a link.

Most new webmasters worry that by providing a link to a competitor, he/she might be sending a potential customer directly to a competitor. While this might be true, if you've created an easy to navigate website and you offer good deals on good products or services, the rewards of having external links far outweigh the risks of losing an occasional customer.

Here's the rub. Soliciting your competitors for reciprocal links is an extremely tedious and time consuming task. So is actually installing them. And checking to make sure that your competitor has actually installed your link takes even more time, not to mention the time it takes to periodically check that their link to your site is still installed.

Even if you have a small site with only a few links, these chores can easily take a person far more than 40 hours per week. In other words, it is a full time job for one or more people. Can you afford that? Probably NOT!

You can hire someone to develop your link exchange on a manual basis. This is very expensive.

You can purchase your own link management software. I'll cover this later in the article.

You could join a link exchange site. I've tried that myself. However there are a lot of drawbacks to doing this, and after learning about them first hand, I resigned from the two link exchanges that I paid to join before my membership expired.

Here are some of the drawbacks that I experienced and learned about when using a link exchange:

1. Google likes natural linking. That means that they like it when a site is so good that webmasters install links to it because they feel that the information provided on the site will be useful to their customers and site visitors. Link exchanges leave a footprint that screams, "I gave this guy a link in exchange for his link." So this tends to devalue the links that you get.

2. I spent dozens of hours picking potential link partners out of the link exchange's database and sending them emails. 99% of them never responded.

3. It's typical for the person who is requesting the link to install his link to the other website first. I have installed tons of links in good faith in this manner. The link exchange partner agreed to the exchange, but he/she never actually installed their link back to my site.

I could go on and on. So even though I paid good money to two different link exchanges, I canceled both memberships way before they expired.

This is the option that I prefer. Actually I've purchased a few different packages. Unfortunately, I had to return all of them because they didn't work as well as I had hoped. But I did manage to find one that does work very well, and I've been using it for about 8 months (as I write this article on March 27, 2007).

Stay tuned, because the software that I'm going to tell you about not only completely automates linking, but it also provides some pretty amazing SEO tools for your website.

LinkMachine fully automates absolutely every phase of link solicitation, installation, testing and follow-up. There are many different ways to solicit links with this software. Here is a listing of the options:

How would you like to add new potential link partner sites?
Exchange InstantLinks with other LinkMachine users
	Find other LinkMachine users with sites related to yours. Easily exchange links with these sites without the need to send e-mails.
Add sites by keywords
	Enter a phrase or set of keywords that people are likely to type into a search engine when looking for a site like yours. The sites that link to the sites that result from this search will be added to your site list.
Add the sites that link to a particular site
	Enter the URL of a website that would appeal to a similar audience as your site, perhaps even a competitor of yours. The sites that link to the site you enter will be added to your site list.
Add a site by hand
	This option allows you to add any site of your choice to your site list.
Add the links on a web page
	Enter the URL of a web page. Each link on that page will be added to your site list. This is useful for importing an old links page into LinkMachine.
Add the links from an html file
	Upload a web page file. Each link on that page will be added to your site list. This is useful for importing an old links page into LinkMachine.
Add the links from a .csv file
	Upload a .csv spreadsheet file. Each link in that spreadsheet will be added to your site list. This is useful for importing links from another link manager, or from a different copy of LinkMachine.
Import the links from another LinkMachine installation
	Directly import all of the links from another LinkMachine installation. This is useful if you manage the links for multiple related sites using LinkMachine.

Using the appropriate options, if you've all ready gotten some links, it's easy to take the links from your site and add them to the LinkMachine software automatically.

And even if you haven't gotten any links yet, it's easy to find other on-topic sites, click a button and have them automatically added to your database, including site description and email address, and then send them an automatic email asking for an exchange.

When you send your solicitation emails, you will want your email to include the URL, Link Text, and site information that you want your link partner to use. LinkMachine lets you setup an unlimited number of appropriate listings for your site. These can be automatically included in your solicitation email.

If you have more than one listing setup, LinkMachine will rotate through your list of listings as it sends out each email to your potential link partners. You will want to ask for links to many different web pages on your site. Don't just ask for links to your homepage because the search engines view that as unnatural linking! And make sure that the link text is appropriate for the specific URL in your listing.

In the solicitation emails that LinkMachine send out, it will also include the page that you've placed the reciprocal link on, as well as a link to a page where your partner can modify his listing on your site if he needs to. He will also place of your URL on his site, on this page. LinkMachine will automatically check that link, and if it is present and correct, it will mark the listing in your database as "Link Exchange Complete."

LinkMachine will check all reciprocal links as often as you schedule it. If a newly requested link is not present, it will send out reminders as often as you schedule them. And if your link isn't reciprocated within "X" number of reciprocal link checks, it will automatically delete the potential partner's site from your database and your link pages, if you tell it to do so.

LinkMachine will check all of your completed reciprocal links as often as you schedule it to do so. And if it finds any that are missing, it will automatically send your link partner an alert that the link is missing. And if your link isn't replaced within "X" number of reciprocal link checks, it will send additional reminders if you chose. And it will automatically delete the partner's site from your database and your link pages after "X" number of times that it is missing, if you tell it to do so.

You have complete control over everything that is said in all of the different emails that LinkMachine can send out. Basically, once LinkMachine is setup, you can either run it manually, or you can run it on autopilot. In either case, LinkMachine will do what ten men (or women) could do in hundreds of hours, in a matter of minutes. And it will do it right!

LinkMachine gives you several different templates for your reciprocal links pages. And you can customize them to match your web site.

LinkMachine's SEO Wizard can help you figure out what your competition is doing to rank at the top of any of the major search engines by backwards engineering their site.

You tell LinkMachine the keywords and the search engine. Then tell it to analyze the top "X" number of sites for those search terms. LinkMachine will give you a breakdown of the number of external links to those sites, the number of times each of those search terms is on those web pages, what is in the meta tags, and a whole slew of other valuable information that will help you to optimize your pages for the specific search engine and keywords that you choose.

LinkMachine's Link Analyzer can find the other sites that link back to your site, regardless of whether they are reciprocal links, or one-way links. It will tell you what their page rank is, and lots of other useful information.

LinkMachine's Rank Tracker will track and graph your ranking progress for any keywords that you choose. It would take you hours each week to manually search each engine for your site to see where it stands. This function doe it all in a few minutes automatically.

There is a lot more that LinkMachine can do for you. If you are interested, click the link below to learn more about LinkMachine. Financially, LinkMachine is totally affordable, so as you've probably guessed, I highly recommend it!

Reciprocal Linking Information