More and more folks are realizing that building a solid themed reciprocal link directory is an affordable and highly effective way to increase inbound traffic. Not only is traffic generated through direct external links but weight is also given to search engines, as they assume that your website is more relevant. Relevant link building is clearly the key, where spammers requesting any link they can get will lose out every time. The more experienced you get in website promotion, the more you will want to concentrate on quality links. Let's look at one or two good rules to adhere to:

Only trade links with a website that:

Shares an interested audience This is extremely important. If your website is about fly fishing in Montana then linking to a site that sells Viagra is not going to do you any favors. Just as importantly, when you do get offered a link from a site that shares your audience, make sure they are not linking to those Viagra sites!

Only trade links with a website that:

Has a clearly visible text link to its link directory I can't tell you how many times I get proposed a link trade with a site that has told me they have already placed a link on their links page. 50% of the time they have not placed a link and secondly there is no clearly visible link to their links page from their home page. What good is that to anyone? I can't get traffic from their site and Google won't index either as it can't spider the page.

Only trade links with a website that:

Has a links page with no more than 50 to 60 links displayed Many webmasters have no idea that search engines detest link farms and will ban a page with an excessive amount of links. More importantly they may not know that their links page is presently perceived as a link farm. They have simply added too many links on one page. Keep a links page to a minimum of say 50 links per page along with a keyword-laden title and description and only link to others who follow this principle.

Only trade links with a website that:

Has a Google pagerank not less than your own This is a good rule of thumb. Clearly we would all love to trade links with a 9/10 site. It simply ain't gonna happen if you are still at 1/10. Take a few baby steps and climb up the ladder. Once in a while you might get a good 5 or 6 during the early stages. Just make sure you don't link to zeros, especially if their page is chock full of links. It may have been banned anyway.

Only trade links with a website that:

Has a static html links page Google doesn't rank pages particularly well that are 'called' from other scripts, so try to stay away from these! Be cautious of .asp or .php scripts even though they may appear to be static. My rule of thumb is I will only link to .html pages unless the pagerank is worth it.

I have one or two pet peeves as far as link proposal etiquette is concerned. Here are a few things to take on board when proposing a link trade:

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