Tips & Tricks for Finding Quality Reciprocal Link Partners for your Online Store

If you’re looking to build incoming links and traffic to your eCommerce site, one way to find reciprocal link partners is to do searches in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to find sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors.

When you find a website that looks like a good option, you should check out their “links” pages, and examine the page/website/content to decide if this particular site would be a good one to contact for a link exchange.

Follow these steps to setup your reciprocal link:

Find GOOD QUALITY, complementary sites.
Place a link to them on your site FIRST.
Only AFTER you’ve placed a link to them, email the owner of the site a short, friendly reciprocal email request note. Address him or her by name. (If the name isn’t on the site, you may be able to find it at DomainTools.com.)
Genuinely praise something on the site. If you can’t find something worth praising, delete the site from your list.
Tell the web site owner you’ve linked to their site, giving them the URL of the page where you’ve place your link.
Ask for a link back to your site, suggesting a page where the link would be appropriate.
Three weeks later, if there’s been no reply, send a brief, polite reminder. It’s easy for emails to be lost or overlooked.
Use the phone and/or snail mail. A link from a good site is a very valuable thing. If you can’t get noticed by email, consider trying a phone call or posting a letter. They’re more expensive but also more likely to attract the answer you want.
Keep an alphabetical record of sites you’ve linked to and requested links from. You need to know who you’ve contacted and who you haven’t.

When you’ve contacted at least 100 site owners, you can then evaluate the effectiveness of this particular link building method and determine if worthwhile to continue. However, keep in mind, with high rankings on the search engine so dependant on incoming link quantity and quality, every single link you can get is another “vote” to push your website to the top of page 1!