Reciprocal Linking is Bad for Your Business Website Health

As small business owners, we need to find traffic for our websites from wherever we can get it — assuming, of course, that the source is relevant traffic. Irrelevant traffic actually HURTS your website rank in the search engines so we don’t want that. For that reason, we are not fans of reciprocal linking schemes, link farms, etc.

Case in point. I recently met with a new client in Los Angeles who needed to market their small business website. They had previously enjoyed a Page Rank of 5 for their website. Over the past two years, it has dropped to a Page Rank of 3. This was due to a number of factors, but chief among those was the fact that they had been forced into a reciprocal linking arrangement with an unscrupulous vendor. It benefited the vendor tremendously, as they were able to show the search engines that their site was being ranked to from a PR5 website; it made the vendor’s site more “buoyant” (it made it rank higher) in the search engines. The moral of the story is, be very careful if someone offers to do you the “favor” of creating a link to your site, in exchange to linking from yours. It could be detrimental to your website’s Search Engine health.

Nevertheless, you should look for opportunities to receive links from relevant websites whenever possible. It might not seem fair to “take” a link without giving one back, but there are other ways you can help the linking website. If they have a satellite website, you could consider linking to that in the body of one of your posts — relevant topic / contextual link / deep link to the satellite site. Just be careful that the link partner understands that directly linking from the satellite site to their main site will not be nearly as good as if they link in a broad circle of 10 sites before returning to the main site. This is somewhat sophisticated SEO / linking strategy that we’re sharing, so it’s not for everyone to implement on their own. It also implies that you have up to 10 web properties that are all somewhat related that can be daisy chained together… Again, not for everyone. But definitely for businesses that want to insure being on Page 1 on Google.

It requires a lot of time, attention and planning to implement a 10-site daisy chain strategy, and we encourage you to go into that with plenty of forethought. Take the time to not only analyze and eliminate any chance of reciprocal linking or neighbor linking possibilities in the chain, and also insure that whomever in your organization will be managing your website network understands this strategy. A small business SEO Policy is a very smart investment in resources. It takes relatively little time for a website to fall in page rank, and a significantly greater amount of time to gain rank — especially after it is lost.

The underlying issue of Page Rank has been said to be overrated, and it’s largely a symbol of the site’s overall bouyancy in the search engines… it’s not necessarily a goal for a web owner to achieve a particular page rank; it’s more of a barometer or guideline than a definitive benchmark or landing point. The website owner with a page rank of 0 would certainly agree that a page rank of 5 would represent that his/her traffic has achieved more traffic (visitors), more conversions and more leads & sales. That’s really the benchmark we’re aiming for.

How to get more traffic using Twitter For Business

Twitter has created a lot of attention in the last few months with a frenzy of celebrities discussing Twitter on their TV shows , and Internet marketing gurus telling you, we should use Twitter to create hundreds of followers , the interest in Twitter is at a record peak . You almost certainly know people who are on Twitter and your suppliers may have invited you to their Twitter profile . So the million dollar question is this . What are YOU doing about it for yourself?

It seems as though many people are still ignoring the potential of Twitter. That could be because it’s potential is disguised inbetween benile posts about breakfast choice.

Despite what you think of Twitter for yourself, there are opportunities you should deploy and there’s a great FREE training video about that at http://www.TrafficHug.com/twittervideo/ but whatever you do, you should be doing something. The smallest benefit will be extra chances for impressions , ideally with some way of people finding you by your keyword, or your name. It could be embarrassing if surfers search for you and your competitor , or a cyber squatter, have taken your place to your own name.

In other articles we talk about how to get noticed for your keyword and how to manage your account for targeted conversion (also covered well in that free video I mentioned earlier) but let’s do something we can do right now.

Some business owners perceive Twitter traffic as being an internal affair . A concept most Twitter directories encourage . But with Twitter , the advantages of having your existing clients follow you on Twitter are enormous . So enormous that we need to start integrating immediately .

One thing we can do almost immediately is to add a Twitter “badge” to your existing web entities . A badge is just an image saying who you are on Twitter with a link direct to your Twitter page. In the videos I mentioned , you’ll discover a lot more , but we’ll stick to just the badge for now .

WHERE CAN I CREATE MY TWITTER BADGE?
You can get your own customised Twitter badge for FREE from this website ;
http://wwwTwitterHug.com/twitter/category/badge/ – FREE Customised Twitter FollowMe Badges .

You paste the HTML in to your site.

It works great on WordPress blogs as a sidebar Text Widget. I’ve placed them on all my blogs.

The Twitter badge is supplied in its own code block so should reside fine almost anywhere.

If you create a table or div tag to position it in , then you can just paste the code in easily . With WYSIWYG html editors, there is usually an HTML “object” box you can place in the desired location and just place the code in to that. Adobe Dreamweaver users can just insert an AP Layer (from the insert menu) and then paste the code in to that using the HTML code view pane.

Integrating your Twitter page with your existing web properties is an essential strategy. One you can do in the next 10 minutes, with a few mouse clicks,