As a webmaster, you need to develop a good traffic-building plan. Although there are many new techniques of creating traffic, it is also important to remember the old methods like reciprocal linking.

Reciprocal links or link swaps is a traffic-producing method where you trade links with other webmasters. It could help you to get your site listed and boost your position in search engines.

So, what is this article about? This article is about what you can do to check whether your link on your link partner's website will be accessible or not, both for human visitors and search engines.

Here are several steps you should take to implement a good reciprocal linking strategy:

-No Hidden Link page
The link page of your link partner has to be accessible to people and search engines and it should have a well-structured navigation system. Check the route that people and search engines would use to get from that site over to yours.

Visit his/her homepage, find and then click a link that will direct you to his link page. Make sure the link to the link page does exists on the homepage.

-Meta Tag (NoIndex, NoFollow)
View the source (HTML code) of a link page and notice the Meta Tags. Make sure you don't find tags like below:

meta name="Robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

If you find it, the link page will not be indexed by search engines.

Another trick that could be used to prevent search engines to index a webpage by some webmasters is by putting some code in the robots.txt file.

The code is like this:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /links.html

-No Redirection
Make sure your partner's link page contains the link to your website, without redirection. Click your own link and notice the URL on your browser. It should show your website URL. It is better if you check the HTML code of the link page manually.

-Huge Link Directory
Although a link page is accessible and you don't find any cheating techniques, there is something else you should notice. Try to avod exchanging links with sites that have deep link pages. Although they could be indexed by search engines, you will not receive much visitors from burried webpages. Remember that the main goal of any linking strategy is to get more traffic to your website.

- Search Engine Friendly Link Pages
Although I am not really sure about it, but it is better if the URL of your partner's link page does not contain question "%" mark.

If you don't have enough time to check your link manually, there are some good reciprocal linking software available today. To what I know, the best two are Reciprocal-Manager and LinkMachine. Both have automatic checking features that could save your invaluable time in order to increase your link popularity and both are search engine friendly.

So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, do the steps above. By exchanging links with other relevant websites, the door for future join venture with the owners may open.

Heris Yunora is the owner of Contents For Websites, a blog that provides tips on how to find or build contents for website.