Since most link building campaigns are done to support ongoing ranking strategies, it's important to know where and how to look for "link traps" that keep you from your Search Engine Optmization (SEO) efforts and goals. Websites that employ the use of robots.txt, JavaScript or certain redirects should be avoided. Websites that show no meter of Google green (PR) should be thoroughly checked. It's important to secure links from a venue a search engine can spider. Links from websites outside your industry niche won't hurt your link buidling effort, however they don't provide a good ranking boost contribution since it doesn't reinforce any revelancy of your keywords.

Overview Reciprocal linking is an effective way of generating targeted, topic related traffic to your website. By increasing the amount of websites that pass a vote to your web page through the use of a backlink, the more important Googles will deem your website, which with time will lead to higher Search Engine Result Pages (SERP's).

What we will focus on is determining which link exchange partners have links that are worthwhile of your time & effort. When looking for link exchange partners you want to look at multiple factors to ensure you are receiving a quality link exchange that allows a vote to be passed back to your web page. Intensed Development is going to review 3 factors that qualifies the link as a good exchange:

1. Passing a vote 2. Passing traffic 3. Passing PageRank 4. TrustRank

1. Passing a Vote This factor is more virtual than materialistic since this would at most times be based on your personal opinion. The quality of the vote passed on to your web page consists of multiple pointers that you have to ask yourself:

* Is it informative to your websites topic? Does it provide a quantity of quality content? Stick to websites that provide unique content that provides additonal insight and is revelant to your websites topic.

* How long has the website being in existence? Has this website being in existence long enough to build itself up to be considered an authority site?

* How many outgoing links does the link page have? Web pages that have less than 50 outgoing links are still considered effective enough to exchange with. See it this way: A Search Engine will provide (example) 100 points to each pages outgoing links. If you have one outgoing link it will get the full vote value. If you have 50 outgoing links to other websites, than you vote count is only 2 points. Web pages with limited amount of outgoing links are favorable.

* The placement of the link: Will the link partner allow a submission of your link within a paragraph of keyword related / informative text? This way your outgoing link does not follow the webs usual linking exchange pattern, which overtime could become devalued with Search Engines? The surrounding text reinforces your links keywords and might provide additional boost in the keywords revelance.

2. Passing Traffic

* Serves good for targeted and high-volume traffic which could convert to clients. Many times the position of the link is what it takes to get more traffic from the website. On good way to determine the hotspot where visitors look most often is by checking out this site EyeTracker

3. Passing PageRank

* PageRank (PR) is Google rating system of the quality of the website. The bar runs between 1 to 10 and the closer to 10 you can get the more valuable the exchange. In the past, Page Rank has been the main focus point in many webmasters and Search Engine marketers. Page Rank has overtime become less important in Google's overall ranking algorithm, and now it determines the interval of the Search Engines spider / bots return to the website, for faster indexing of new content.

4. TrustRank

* TrustRank is the use of a seed list of trusted Google websites in order to combat spammy link tactics. When receiving a link from these trusted group of websites, resulting in higher search engine rankings. Trustrank was born out of a need to test websites for quality links and to combat spam linking efforts. Due to large numbers of webmasters and site owners going to great lengths to get higher rankings with paid links, link farms and other violation of Google's terms of service ' Webmaster Guidelines Google submitted a patent in 2004 regarding the use of TrustRank.

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