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I have had a career in the traditional Western medical field as a Registered Nurse for 35 years. I spent 13 of them in the Rehabilitation field and saw many different and difficult cases. One of the units I worked on saw back pain patients who had been unable to work for a long time and were not getting better. Many of them had mid back pain and had pain with any kind of movement. The unit explored many different modalities from inner core muscle strength training, transcutaneous stimulation, and relaxation therapy. In later years, I discovered Pilates and Qi QWong.

After having a history of back problems, with intermittent bouts of pain, muscle spasms and sometimes disc inflammation, I felt I was experienced in dealing with back pain. I had worked on a unit for patients with chronic back pain when I was young which only resulted in my being able to instruct others in managing their pain, but not in incorporating it into my own life. It took an auto accident many years later to bring me to that point. I was fortunate to be sent to a physical therapist that taught me back pain exercises to strengthen my core muscles.

Reciprocal links are an important step in your overall plan to get site visitors.

What are they? Reciprocal links are mutual links you and some other web site owner agree to post on your respective sites.

Why are they so important? It goes back to the basic nature of the Internet. The Internet exists as an information medium. When you go to a search engine, you are looking for links to the information you need. The better information sources have already been found by others, many of whom thought so much of those sources that they placed links to them on their web site. So the number of other web sites linking to a particular source of information, the better the chance it is a good source of information. All the major search engines take link popularity into account when they determine how to rank the results of any search. The end result is that to get a good ranking in the major search engines, an important step is to make sure there are lots of other sites that link back to yours. And, since the links are reciprocal, you will need to put a link to each site that links to you. You can’t expect someone to link to you unless you link to them.

All right, you say, I will get all my friends to put links to my site on their sites. Not so fast! The number of links isn’t all that matters! In addition to looking at the number of links that point to your site, the search engines also examine the quality of those links. Links from sites that are relevant to yours rank highest. If you sell dog food, for example, some good sites to link to yours would be pet toys, dog training, dog grooming, etc. Acquiring a lot of links that don’t relate to your site not only doesn’t help your search engine ranking, it will hurt it, because the search engines will assume you are trying to fool them into thinking your site is popular with a lot of “junk” links. Don’t worry, there are lots and lots of relevant sites to do reciprocal linking with.

The number one ranking for any search term isn’t entirely determined by the number of links to a site, but it is an important factor. And, as you know, having a ranking in the top ten for a search term will guarantee more visitors to your site. But in addition to improving your chances of being found through search engines, having links to your site on lots of other sites means you will get exposure to many site visitors who look at the links page or links section of a site for other related sites to visit. And, the more places your name and site name pop up, the more you are likely to be recognized as an authority on the topic of your site.

So how do you go about building reciprocal links on your site?

First of all you need to realize that reciprocal link building is an ongoing process, not a one shot deal. It needs to be something you continue to work on, although some of it can be automated. You will want to build a links page on your site, where you will place links to other sites which are also linking to you. Since you expect your links page to grow, you should establish separate link categories, all relating to the theme of your site. You can get an inexpensive script for creating and managing a link directory at Linking101.com, not to mention a lot of good, general information about linking.

On your links page, be sure to include simple instructions for anyone who wants to link with you. Many sites include a short piece of HTML code including all your link information, ready to be placed on the reciprocal sites links page. Be sure to place an easily-found link to your links page on the main page of your site as well.

Now you are ready to go looking for relevant link partners, sites that are complementary to yours, but not competitors. You can do it the manual way, by doing searches on your site’s favorite keywords. When you find a site, evaluate it for content relevant to your own, evaluate its quality and note its search engine rank. If you have to choose between a site that is ranked #2 and one that is #20, always choose the higher ranked site. Look for the links page, where you should find instructions on initiating links between your sites. If you don’t find one, it usually isn’t worth your time to contact the webmaster to inquire about links; go to the next one.

One method to speed up the process is to use a free service from http://linkpopularity.com/. From this site you can check the link popularity of your site. But, you can also check which sites are linked to your competitors - particularly your competitors with the high search engine ranking. With that information, you can go to each of these sites and most likely get a reciprocal link. A similar product, Link Survey, is available at http://www.antssoft.com/linksurvey/index.htm.

Another system for speeding up the process is http://links4trade.com/. Although not free, it also helps to manage the headache of link page maintenance.

Link exchange services which claim to completely automate the link exchange process can be found at http://www.powerlinks.com/ and http://www.softbizscripts.com/link-exchange-script-features.php.

A quite amazing tool you might look at is called Zeus, at http://www.cyber-robotics.com/index.htm. Zeus is an intelligent robot that builds a link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A free version is available. You can also find a group of Zeus users ready to swap links at http://www.zeuscollective.com/.

Regardless of how you do it, continue to pursue reciprocal links and make it a part of your overall marketing strategy; you are sure to find it rewarding!

About The Author

Darryl DeLong is a successful Internet Marketer and Ezine Publisher.
Learn how to build up your opt-in list, site visitors and sales with my brand new ebook entitled “Viral Internet Marketing Strategies” get a free copy here: http://www.viral-internet-marketing.com

This is a REAL IN-DEPTH review of the SEO Elite version 3.2 software that is currently out. Every claim I make here is 100% accurate, and you can even verify the results yourself.

I started up my Central Florida Surf Report website in January 2005. I was receiving around 40 unique visitors a day from word-of-mouth traffic. Being out of the website design business for about 2 years, I didn’t even know what Google PageRank was. I had no idea that backlinks with anchor text was what ran the search engines nowadays.

After realizing this by reading on the forums over at GeekVillage I decided I better get jumping on my link campaign. I started going around the internet in search engines and e-mailing potential link partners that had the same basic content as my website.

Many of the people liked my website design and content, thus giving me a high trade link success rate. In my niche ’surfing’ or ’surf reports’ most of the webmasters aren’t out to get money or take your search engine rankings, so it was actually a little easier getting backlinks.

For about 4 months I was manually doing this by hand and only got up to around 250 backlinks in MSN and Yahoo!. Hardly any backlinks were showing in Google, but everyone knows that Google doesn’t show the correct amount of backlinks. Even right now it shows link:www.cflwaves.com as having ONE backlink.

In June, I finally decided that I was over the process of manually finding the link partners. I started using the program Arelis and was amazed at the ease of use finding new link partners. I DID NOT like the fact that the program didn’t show me any of the pages PageRank though. I only used Arelis for about 3 days, getting around 25 backlinks.

I started searching around in the internet for an alternative and stumbled into SEO Elite by Brad Callen. I downloaded the demo and was amazed at the results I was getting. I had picked up about 50 backlinks in only 2 days of use. Then I saw Brad introduced the new Project 8: Find and Submit Using Link Submission Forms.

After watching Brad’s tutorial videos on this new project, I IMMEDIATELY went and purchased the product. After the first day I had already picked up 50 new backlinks using this new feature.

The keyphrase that I was targeting was ‘Central Florida Surf Report’. If you check MSN, I am ranked #1. If you check Yahoo! I am ranked #1. If you check Google I am still ranked #3 but I am pretty sure after the next Google update I will be #1. The cool thing about it is that since I was targetting ‘Central Florida Surf Report’, it eventually rolls over to ‘Florida Surf Report’. On MSN I am #1 for ‘Florida Surf Report’. On Yahoo! I am #1 for ‘Florida Surf Report’. On Google I am #15, but this should also go up the next Google update. Rolling over again, it eventually turns into ’surf report’, currently on MSN I am ranked #13 for this keyphrase. It is very exciting to watch all my work actually pay off.

My traffic has tripled since January, and this month (August) I am expecting to receive from 11,000 - 12,000 unique visitors. Pretty good for a surf report website where all I do is update the surf report daily and forecast every few days right? This website is currently earning me over $600 a month in Adsense revenue, and that is increasing every month.

It is important to note that not all of your traffic comes from the search engines. When you are trading links with other websites, you also receive traffic from their websites, so the more backlinks you have, overall the more people you have!

These results are all due to the SEO Elite software by Brad Callen. Now here is my detailed project by project review of his software:

Project 1: Analyze backlinks using a specified search engine
________

This project allows you to analyze your competitors search engine backlinks using any of the major search engines. The program will show you what anchor text people are linking to them with, the IP address of the website, the PageRank of the website, the Alexa Rank of the website, the Page Title that the link is on, how many outbound links the page has, and how many total links the page has. This project also shows you in an easy list how many PR0-10’s and their percentage that are linking to the site. It is kind of hard to explain so here is the format:

PR = 0 520.1%
PR = 1 810.5%
PR = 2 1313.3%
PR = 3 4543.3%
PR = 4 2420.4%
PR = 5 1210.2%
PR = 6 43.7%
PR = 7 00.0%
PR = 8 00.0%
PR = 9 00.0%

(Not my site’s statistics.)

Project 2: Find and Email High Page Rank Link Partners
________

This is my favorite project of the whole program. It lets you find and email people that have atleast the minimum PageRank that you specify. You can find sites based on sites that link to your competitor, based on a search term, or from a links page - such as if your competitor has a long links page, and you want them all to link to you as well.

All you have to do is start the project, then load up one of your e-mail templates, select multiple e-mail addresses from the list and SEO Elite will send an e-mail to every single one of them. None of the receivers know that you have also sent that e-mail to another person. You can also customize your site templates to include the receiver’s name and website URL, so that the emails do not look machine generated.

Project 3: Analyze allinanchor, allintitle or allintext.
________

This project allows you to enter a keyword and analyze the top 10 ranking for allinanchor, allintitle, or allintext.

Allinanchor shows you the top number of websites with that particular keyword in their anchor text. If you are ranked #1 for allinanchor, you should soon be ranked #1 for that certain keyword.

Allintitle shows you the top number of websites with that particular keyword in their