What should you be looking for when you are attempting to build reciprocal links?
Most people with a little knowledge think the answer to this question is simple. PR rank.

Well yes, PR rank is important, but it is not the be all and end-all to reciprocal linking and search engine placement.

Pagerank is important to a Google listing for your market keywords but Google a long time ago decided to make things a little more complicated than just awarding placement to the site with the largest number of high PR ranking links.

Google does not like you buying links so it started to put more importance on the relevance of the site linking to you as well as the page rank. So as far as Google goes what you need to find are high PR relevant sites to yours.

That is a little more difficult, but not impossible.

First you need to find relevant sites. This is easy as all you need to do is search for the keywords that you wish to be ranked for and up pop millions of pages that you eventually dream of overtaking. Now you want to find those sites that will exchange links. To do this just search for keyword + Add Url + Add Link or a combination of the two. This will find you pages where there is add link in the text of the page somewhere so more than likely they are open to exchanging links.

I work a lot in the Spanish property market so I might search for;

Property + Add Url or Spanish + All Link or Spain + Submit site. You can also use related keywords such as Real Estate etc.

Once you have narrowed down the search to the relevant sites that will exchange links you can start filtering out those sites whose Link pages will never get cached and thus will never provide any value to your site.

First, go to the homepage and see if the link pages are linked from it. This will tell you if the page your link is going to appear on will ever have any value. If the page where your link is likely to appear is more than two clicks away from the homepage I would disregard it unless it is a high ranking site with PR valued links pages already.

Also check the source code of the links page. There are sneaky, underhand people out there who will put a meta tag in the head portion of the page HTML with a no follow tag. This tells the search engines not to look on this page. Your link will never be found whilst the link you put on your site will add value to their site.

A neat trick you can use following on from the searches above to find .edu or .gov sites which may be deemed important to your market is;
site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "your keyword"

This search will find blogs for .edu sites which allow you to post a comment. Keep your comments relevant and fresh and you should be able to insert a link to your site as well.

Good link hunting.