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Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning
By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. (c) 2005
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/) 

It's no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an
important part of any complete search engine positioning
strategy. You've undoubtedly received 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, however, establishing
quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide added
weight and many of the tactics used in developing these 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 (the search engines can
detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is
that they don't have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal
links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical
webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to
insure that the search engines don't see the links pages. You
have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their
links from your site if warranted. With non-reciprocal links,
however, you don't have to be as concerned since you're not
linking to them.

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. But how do you get something for
nothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange for
no links back? Keep in mind the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain't
No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you're not going to
get something for nothing but it's well worth the "something"
you'll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine
positioning campaign... but how do you do it? There are a
number of tactics that will work. Here are a few of the more
successful:

Write Good Content
It's shocking, but some people will actually link to your site
because it is a valuable resource that their visitors may find
interesting or useful. 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. Believe it or not this practice still exists
today.

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 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
(http://dir.yahoo.com/). 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) (http://www.dmoz.org/), 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.

How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatable
depending on the industry, the value of the link, etc. However,
in the majority of cases, topical directory listings are usually
somewhere around $30-$100/yr . If your link will be placed on a
page with a good PageRank and with fewer than 50 or so other
sites it is worth considering.

Article Submissions
As you're reading this article you should certainly be able to
infer that I personally am a fan of writing articles as a form
of non-reciprocal link building. Articles provide perhaps the
best of all worlds in that they provide valuable and entirely
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. As a tip, when you find sites you wish to submit
your article to, add them to a folder in your "Favorites" (or
"Bookmarks" for those of us using Firefox). If you decide to
publish more articles in the future (and you probably will) it's
certainly helpful to start with a list of the places you're
submitting to rather than having to find them all again down the
road.

When you're writing your article there are a few considerations
that you should take into account. One of the biggest benefits
of articles as a link building strategy is that the links are
relevant because they are about the topic of your site. Why not
ensure that your titles and content are written such that they
add further weight for your targeted keywords. If you look at
the title of this article "Non-Reciprocal Link Building For
Higher Search Engine Positioning" you'll notice that the phrase
"search engine positioning" (our main targeted phrase) is
present. Additionally, the phrase is repeated periodically in
the content area. This adds relevancy to the article and our
targeted phrase. If you look in the credits below you'll notice
that the anchor text linking to our site is "Beanstalk Search
Engine Positioning" (assuming that the site on which you are
reading this article allowed for HTML submissions otherwise the
link should simply be the http format). This adds additional
relevancy tying that phrase to our site.

Because the Beanstalk website is still in the sandbox on Google
it is unable to rank for this highly competitive phrase. You may
notice, however, that currently the #11 ranking page is one of
our articles. This alone should demonstrate that these articles
can pick up relevancy. Once Beanstalk is out of the sandbox on
Google we will have many highly relevant links that are strong
enough to rank #11 on their own. You can do the same provided
that you treat writing your articles the same as your content.
It must contain your targeted keywords and it must read well.

You are also going to want to search for many related
websites to submit to. You can visit the search engines
themselves to find related sites (in our case we would run a
search such as "search engine positioning articles submit")
or you can use a program like PR Prowler
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.htm)
to find the links and also ensure a minimum PageRank on the sites
you are submitting to.

If you decide to publish more than one article I would further
recommend that you add to your list with each submission. Take
a few minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites
to submit your articles to. You'll find your link popularity
and rankings will reward you for it.

Summary
Of course, there are many additional tactics you can use
to get non-reciprocal links, including paid links, press
releases, etc. However, those noted above are the ones which
will produce the most consistently over time and while they
can be time consuming, are well worth the effort.

I wish you the very best of luck in developing your
non-reciprocal links and in increasing your search engine
positioning. It will take time; it will take energy; but done
right it can be very rewarding.

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Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and
ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of
success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may
have about your website and how to get it into the top positions
on the major search engines. To keep informed about what is
going on in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly
created SEO blog (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/) on the
Beanstalk website.
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