For some webmasters, the all-consuming goal becomes achieving and maintaining a top 10 or top 20 listing. While a high listing in one of the major engines would be great, not everyone is going to be able to accomplish that. You should always submit your site to the major search engines and do what you can within reason to try to ensure a good listing, but don't put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. There are other ways to promote your site and these other methods might just work as well as, or in some cases better than, search engines and directories to refer people to your site. The promotion method I want to discuss in this article is linking.
Reciprocal links are agreements between site owners to display each other's hypertext links.
Non-reciprocal links, then, are links to your site that another site owner has placed on his or her page without requiring you to do the same. These types of links are what I strive for as a site owner. I'm going to outline a few ways to cultivate each kind of link and some DOs and DON'Ts in each category. One of my visitors emailed me just today asking what he could do to get more site owners to trade links. As a site owner myself, I've been approached by many people and I've discovered quite a few things that discourage me from swapping links with other sites.