Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning

There are two main benefits to non-reciprocal links instead of reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weight, since they aren't reciprocated (the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is they don't need to be tracked as closely as reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one must be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to insure that the search engines do not see the links pages. You have to know about these events so you can remove their links from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocal hyperlinks you do not have to be as worried as you are not linking to them.

These are far from the only advantages of non-reciprocal link building but they are two of the most beneficial for your website and for you as its webmaster. But how can you get something for nothing? Why would someone want to connect to you in exchange for no links back? Remember the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In summary, you are not going to get something for nothing but it's well worth the"something" you'll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine positioning campaign ... but how do you do it? There are a variety of strategies that will work. Here are Some of the more effective:

Write Decent Content

It is shocking but a few people will actually link to a website as it's a valuable resource that their visitors may find useful or interesting. The search engines initially gave incoming links value based on the belief that sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because they found the content useful. Believe it or not this practice still exists today.

When you've got an excellent site with good content, preferably updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link to you. It's also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to your website either through direct contact or by posting a page on your website, which provides link or images details. If you get even one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or so minutes it should take to put up the webpage.

Directory Listings

So long as you're willing to spend a little time and cash, directory listings are probably the simplest way to find non-reciprocal links. Provided that you're site has some value to it and isn't offensive, most directories will list it though usually there's a"review fee" involved.

There are lots of directories and there are also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can provide valuable listings. In actuality, topic-specific directory listings can in many ways be considered more valuable because the link to your website is entirely relevant and also, you should find some quality targeted traffic from the listing provided that the directory itself ranks well.

How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatable depending on the industry, the value of this connection, etc. nonetheless topical directory listings are usually somewhere around $30-$100/yr in the vast majority of cases. If your link will be placed on a webpage with a great PageRank and will fewer than 50 or so other sites it might be well worth considering.

Article Submissions

As you are reading this article you should certainly be able to infer that I personally am a fan of writing articles as a sort of non-reciprocal link building. Articles provide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they provide valuable and entirely relevant links and also can be a fantastic source of targeted traffic.

That said, articles are also the most time consuming of link building efforts. One has to consider the time necessary to write the article, find sites to publish it and also the entry of the articles to each of these sites. As a hint, when you find sites you would like to submit your post to add them to a folder in your"Favorites" (or"Bookmarks" for those of us using Firefox). If you choose to publish more articles in the future (and you probably will) it's certainly helpful to begin with a list of those places you're submitting to rather than having to find them all again down the road.

Additionally, you're going to want to look for many related websites to submit to. You can visit the search engines themselves to find related sites (in our case we would run a search such as"search engine positioning articles submit") or you could use a program like PR Prowler to discover the links and also guarantee a minimum PageRank on the sites you're submitting to.

If you choose to publish more than 1 article I would further recommend that you add to your list with each entry. Simply take a few minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites to submit your articles to. You'll find your link popularity and rankings will reward you for it.

Summary

Of course there are many additional tactics you can use to become non-reciprocal links including paid links, press releases, etc. nevertheless those mentioned above are those that will produce the most consistently over time and while they could be time consuming, are well worth the effort.

I wish you the very best of luck in creating your non-reciprocal links and in increasing your search engine placement. It will take some time; it takes energy; but done correctly it will be very rewarding.