An Overlooked Method for SEO... Non-Reciprocal Links
by Patrick Comtois

If you are a home business entrepreneur, you have heard countless times, that building linking relationships is important to obtaining a high search engine ranking, so it no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an important part of any complete search engine positioning strategy. If your inbox looks like mine, you undoubtedly receive numerous emails touting the benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Provided that the sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitely help you in your quest for higher rankings. I have been reading quite a bit of information in reputable SEO newsletters about how establishing quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide additional credibility and how many of the tactics used in developing these non-reciprocal links have built-in relevancy. There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weight, as they aren't reciprocated and yes, the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal. The second advantage is that they require virtually no monitoring unlike reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or employ tactics to insure that the search engines don't see the links pages. Utilize a reciprocal link checker if your link management software has this feature, or obtain one from somewhere link Hotscripts.com to stay up to date with your links so that you can remove webmasters links from your site if they don’t comply.
These are far from the only benefits of non-reciprocal link building but they are two of the most beneficial for your site and for you as its Webmaster. So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine positioning campaign... but how do you do it? The million-dollar question! There are a number of tactics that will work. Below are a few of the more successful that I have tried.

Write Good Content This is the staple that I try to abide by. One of the most successful affiliate driven companies on the is Site Sell.com. They preach a philosophy of good content leads to traffic which allows you to pre-sell interested potential customers and then and only then can you monetize and get them to purchase. I could not agree more and it all starts with good content. The search engines initially gave incoming links value based on the belief that sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because they found the content useful. This practice still exists today and can be use with great success.

If you have a quality site with great content, preferably updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link to you. It's also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to your site either through direct contact or by posting a page on your site, which provides images and/or link details. If you get even one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or so minutes it should take to put up the page.

Directory Listings If you're willing to invest a bit of time and money, directory listings are probably the easiest and most direct way to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that your site has some value to it and is not offensive, most directories will list it although there is usually a "review fee" involved.

There are the well know directories such as the Yahoo! Directory. You may find, however, that the price tag for a guaranteed review from Yahoo! At $299 is a bit more than you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another "major player" in the directory world is the Open Directory Project (or DMOZ), but you may find that with volunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed, if at all.

Fortunately there are many "secondary" directories and there are also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can provide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directory listings can in many ways be considered more valuable in that the link to your site is entirely relevant. You should also get some quality-targeted traffic from your listing provided that the directory itself ranks well.

Article Submissions Articles provide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they provide value and relevant links and also can be a great source of targeted traffic. That said articles are also the most time consuming of link building efforts. One must consider the time it takes to write the article, find sites to publish it and to submit it to all of these sites. Once you have done the initial footwork of find places to submit to, add them to your favorites so you can readily find them again for quick submission.

Summary There are many additional tactics you can use to get non-reciprocal links, including paid links, press releases and with the advent of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) you can certainly increase your non-reciprocal links. The avenues mentioned above are certainly time consuming, but well worth the effort.