Avoid Falling Victim to These Common Errors

Link building can be a time-consuming task, which makes it especially important to focus your efforts on successful reciprocal exchanges, back links, and other search engine optimization techniques. 

To maximize your efficiency, follow best practices when seeking out webmasters for trades and promotion.

Don't overlook competitors.  Though it may seem like a contradictory concept to link to a competing merchant or service provider, receiving and sharing these can be a good way to boost your own ranking.  You'll also be following the important guideline that the best backlinks come from relevent and related sites.  What could be more relevent than other sites meeting the same needs as yours?  Also remember, it's not about the traffic you receive, it's about the value your backlinks have.

Again, competition is key.  Similar to point #1, evaluating the competition can be a great way to find more trades -- just scan through yahoo's backlink search to see where your competitors have been promoted.  Then try to get those same sites to link to yours.  Since you know they are already linking to similar sites, chances are good they will be approachable.  This is also a good way to discover alternate ways of promoting your site through message boards and comment threads.

Keep track of your links.  Once you have made a trade, be sure to log where your site was linked from so that you can verify periodically that they are still up and active.  If you discover one that has been removed, try contacting the webmasters to see what happened.  If you don't receive a satisfactory answer, go ahead and remove the reciprocal from your site.  

Check for no-follow tags.  A link that is html tagged "no-follow" is useless for search engine purposes.  That tag tells Google and other engines not to count your link, and so receiving a trade with a tagged link is really just a waste of your time.  You can check for this tag by right-clicking on the anchor text and selecting "properties," or by viewing the source code for the page on which it appears and checking for the phrase "rel=nofollow" in the code.  There are also add-ons for the Firefox browser that will highlight no-follows.

Don't overlook sites with low page rank.  Some webmasters refuse to trade with sites that have lower page rank than their own, but they are really missing out on some good opportunities.  Not only do search engines appreciate sites with a diverse range of backlinks, but new or recently developed sites aren't necessarily bad.  Judge your trade partners by more than page rank.  Do they have quality content?  Is the site updated frequently?  Are they providing information that is relevant to your own site?  

Ultimately, approaching link building with a smart and savvy idea of what mistakes to avoid and what angles to take is likely to yield the best results.  Remember, it will take time and effort -- and practice -- to work out the best strategies for your own site.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will your site's search engine reputation be, but with a little hard work and careful planning, you'll get there some day.