Link Building Part II: Non-Reciprocal Link Building

SEO has revealed that having many inbound to your site is an important part of any complete search engine positioning strategy. You probably have received a lot of offers asking you to exchange links with other websites, and this is the rationale behind that. If you find that these websites who offer you link exchanges are related to your site, it is best to take advantage of their offers provided they are of high quality. This is what we call Reciprocal Linking, and this can definitely increase your search rankings. Non-Reciprocal links, or those links not coming from links exchanges, are from websites who use your website’s content and those who do not expect you to link back to their website. Non-reciprocal links to your website will surely provide you an edge in search rankings. Non-reciprocal link building is one of the surest ways for your site to gain that top search rank in most of the search engines.

Many of the tactics used in developing these links have built-in relevancy and there are more advantages to reciprocal link building more so than non-reciprocal links. Non-reciprocal links hold more weight, as they are not “reciprocated”, meaning that the search engines don’t see a link exchange with the websites where your links can be found. Another advantage of non-reciprocal links is they don’t have to be closely monitored. If you did a link exchange and would want to keep benefiting from the exchange, you would have to make sure that your links are still on the other website. Some webmasters would take down links or use other tactics to hide your links from search engines making their websites rank higher than yours. You would have to continually monitor these reciprocal links. With non-reciprocal links, you don’t have to worry about this issue because you are not linking to the other parties’ websites.

These aren’t the only advantages of non-reciprocal links, but these are the main ones. Non-reciprocal building is not an easy task, though, as you would have to pay more attention to your website and update it much more often. You would have to put in extra work in maintaining your website to achieve these from organic methods.

So how do you do it? Here are some techniques to get non-reciprocal links:
Content, Content and More Good Content! Make your website a valuable resource for your website’s main theme or subject. Your visitors would have to find some useful information that they can use for their own websites. Search engines now have the technology to detect whether your website contains links to information that may be worth reading by the users who search for the information. The fact that your website contains useful and valuable information makes your website worth linking to. You should also update your content regularly so that others can say that you are actively providing information, so that more and more websites would naturally link to you.

Although it is expensive to subscribe to directory listings, and you’d have to invest time as well, this is the easiest way to build non-reciprocal links. As long as your website has value and sells some sort of product or service, or provide information about non-offensive matters, most directories would list your website… for a certain fee, of course. While directory submission is not as popular as it once was, it still adds value provided you do it within whitehat SEO guidelines.

Directories like the Yahoo! Directory would charge more because they will review your website contents. The price you have to pay may be a little too much for a single listing, but if you can afford it and you are really targeting to gain more back links, then this is a good investment. There are other directories on the web where you can list your website and there are topic-specific directories where you can place your listing and promote your content as well. From these directories, you can get more targeted visitors which can bring you more business as they are looking for your website’s specific product, service or information.

Directory listings rage from $30 - $300 a year. Make sure you choose a directory with a high PageRank so that you are sure that you’ll get more traffic to your listing, therefore to your website. It is worth paying for a bunch of directory listings if you are really aiming to double, or even triple the number of visitors to website and it is also a good way to get non-reciprocal links.

Articles provide you great content to your website and make your website more reliable because you are giving information to your visitors. This is also a good form of non-reciprocal link building because you can include your website’s links in your articles and publish them out to other sites. This is also a good source of targeted traffic especially if your articles contain relevant information about your website. This, unfortunately, is the most time consuming of all techniques. You would have to write the article, find websites that would publish them, and wait for your articles to appear on their website.

Make sure that your articles are relevant to the subject of your website. Also, use titles that contain your website’s keywords and key phrases. You would also have to repeat your keywords and key phrases in the entire article periodically, but don’t stuff them. This will make your article relevant to your website. You can search for websites that would publish your article or use a paid submission service. Another alternative is to use programs like PR Prowler to find those websites that will accept your articles. PR Prowler also takes into consideration the PageRank of the websites, so it is a good idea to use it for searching for websites you can submit your articles to.

There are a lot of other forms of non-reciprocal link building. Paid links, press releases and other ways are available to you, but those suggested above are those that produce most results over time. Use these techniques wisely, and though time consuming, the results can be very rewarding. Most SEO companies will outsource many of these tasks so that you can reduce the amount of time involved significantly.