What should you be looking for when you are attempting to build reciprocal links?
Most people with a little knowledge think the answer to this question is simple. PR rank.

Well yes, PR rank is important, but it is not the be all and end-all to reciprocal linking and search engine placement.

Pagerank is important to a Google listing for your market keywords but Google a long time ago decided to make things a little more complicated than just awarding placement to the site with the largest number of high PR ranking links.

What an awful attempt to adapt a well known saying to get across a point! I am referring to links pages. Those indexed pages where you place reciprocal links from websites you have approached to swap links with.

So often these days links directories are hidden away from view. Some sites don't even bother and attempt to build their back-links through a three-way link.

I think it is a given that the route to search engine placement lies in your link popularity.
The Page 1 of Google spot that we all desire, will depend on the number of links pointing at your site with the requisite anchor text matching the keywords for the term that you want to be found under.

The talk is all about how to achieve the thousands of links that it is becoming increasingly necessary to have so as to attain the heights of a competitive keyword placement.

Is it arrogance or poor business practice? I don't know, but I do know that when you pay for something and 299 dollars is not chicken feed, you expect a little service.

When I first set up my website the first thing I found out when it came to SEO was that you needed to submit your site to the Yahoo Directory and dmoz.org. These were supposedly the listings you had to have if you wanted to get high rankings on the major search engines.

If you are an estate agent in Spain, then you will not need to be told about internet marketing because you probably get enquiries every day from companies telling you how they can provide leads through this portal or that. Spinning you with figures about how many hits their website is getting and their page 1 ranking for this key phrase or that keyword.

For anybody that has done their research they will know, that paying some-one to work on their website to get to that elusive Page 1 ranking on Google seems to be an expensive exercise with quite possibly no guarantees and the need for a level of trust that frankly, you would find difficulty bestowing on a member of your own family!

The arguments for obtaining the ranking spot are clear.

I hope the title grabbed your attention. This is a true story, but to get the sceptics from clicking off or deleting this article, I will start with some provable facts that you can verify at the click of the mouse.
The website I own with my wife is called amlaspain. It is a Spanish property portal website for real estate agents in Spain. The launch date is stated on the homepage.

In hindsight, the best analogy I can think of, to becoming proficient in Search Engine Optimization is learning to snow-ski.

If you are young enough, fit enough and have a modicum of co-ordination, you should be able to master the slopes to a reasonable level in about 12 weeks. For most of us, of course, this process normally takes place over several years as we fit in a week here, a week-end there.