No one told me how important traffic was when I first started working online. To me, a neophyte to the internet marking thing, traffic was something that I was avoiding by working from home, now all of a sudden I needed this stuff.

Traffic, I was to later find out, was about how many visitors came to my site, sort of like potential customers browsing through a department store. These browsing customers can turn into buying customers if they find what they are looking for. Now before they can find what they are looking for in my store (website) they must first find that store.

There are a number of ways to let the potential customer know where your store (website) is. You can let the customer know where you are by advertising in internet newsletters. You can let the potential customer know where you are by advertising in magazine, both electronic and paper, or the most common way is through search engine submission. What I want to address in this article is letting your potential customer know where you are by an often overlooked, method of reciprocal links.

The concept behind a reciprocal link is that Ill put a link to your site on link page if you put a link to me on yours. Now the goal of reciprocal links is to increase the relevancy of ranking by search engines. Search engine place a value on not just how many site you link to but also on how many sites link back to you. Now if that number of site linking back to you is good, this may increase your ranking on some search engines.

Watch out for junk links Did I say relevancy? Yes your links have got to be links that naturally have a synergy to your site or you may even be penalized for the link. Thats right the search engine may consider your links full of junk a way of spamming them.

Now there are a lot of link farms that a webmaster can join and gain link popularity overnight. Most of the old veterans would tell you that search engine consider them another form of spamming them and that you should not join one.

So how do I get these links on my site you asked? Search for your key words find relevant site to you own and contact the webmaster and ask! That right I said it ask your competitor! Contact a webmaster of a site you want to create a reciprocal link with and just ask. Heres a note of suggestion link up if possible! Try to link to sites that have a higher rating then you this can only increase your popularity.

The Book Dotcomology gives some important information on the proper etiquette in requesting a reciprocal link from another site. Here are the highlights to this format;

1. Check out a competitors website sees how many links he has to his site. One way to do this is to type Link Popularity in Google and use one of the tools that pull that information for you

2. Before you contact the webmaster place a link to their site on your home page, this will assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link.

3. When emailing them create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather then deleting it. Something about their site or a product they sell will more than likely catch their attention.

4. Begin you message by talking about their site and what you thought was interesting about it Detail your product and asked to exchange links with them

5. Let them know exactly where they can find their link on your site.

6. Explain to them that if you do not hear from them within 2 weeks that you will consider it a negative response and remove their link form your site.

Just by increasing your link popularity you can improve your SEO ranking in no time.