Link Popularity is necessary for any website to do well in the search engines. Building links requires experience, motivation, a lot of communication, and a lot of work. The best linking strategy you could possibly have for your website's quality of incoming traffic and your search engine rankings is to seek out solid, permanent links on related pages.
This is known as reciprocal linking or "link exchange."You agree to link to another site, in exchange for them linking to you. As a strategy for increasing the quantity of sites linking to you, it is very popular. You may be contacted by other sites if you have your email address posted somewhere on your site. Or, you can go out on the Web yourself and find some sites to trade links with.First, create a custom HTML page for linking, and link to it from your site’s homepage.
Key facts to consider:
1)A quality link from a high-ranking site will benefit your site more than a large amount of links from only low ranking sites.
2)Links from site to site should be text-based (not images) using one of your main targeted keyword phrases.
3) Link popularity is not effective when used single-handedly as a marketing technique. You will need to work significantly on your site’s text content and researching keyword phrases. Remember to develop and use targeted, popular keyword phrases throughout the text on your site, or have it professionally optimized.
Second, decide what keyword phrases you will use for the links pointing to your site. Links should always be keyword rich text, so use your best performing search terms according to what is getting the most searches in the major engines. You can use our keyword suggestion tool to discover which keyword phrases are getting high traffic.
Third, contact other site owners to discuss trading links. Because you have already established a relationship and rapport with certain people, they will be more inclined to want to link to your site. This will become reciprocal linking if you propose to list a text link to their site if they will in turn list a text link to yours.

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WEB-DEVELOPMENT,SEO,MARKETING,IT OUTSOURCING.

i agree with you marketraise. it's very difficult and time consuming to link exchange with many sites. i'm currently in the process of this now. the site is currently on the first page in google for "freelance forum" and top of second page in google for "website design forum" let me tell you, this is not an easy task. i have other websites that i have top placements as well and can be very rewarding if you keep it up. good luck to all and if any webmaster related site would like to exchange links with FG, then send me a pm.

SEO wise - reciprocal links are weighed less by SE's but is still a factor in determining your PR. Best to focus more on other link backs. The most common ways of getting backlinks are thru social bookmarking, directory submissions, submitting to press release sites, forum sigs, etc. etc.. What's important from an SEO point of view is getting relevant and quality (organic / natural) back links. You get this if you provide very good content that would make other sites want to link to your site. Also having back links to high PR sites helps your site on PR building as well.

On a marketing perspective IMO, having more targetted link backs (wether paid or not) is very important as these yields the highest conversion rate. Thes best way IMO to get targetted traffic is also thru PPC. In general, the more link backs you have - the more exposure your site gets - the more chances you get traffic from these back links ;)

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i wouldn't worry about the pr. just look at doing exactly what tryusout said above. more content is also key. work on content and linkbacks and your site will flurish.