This is pretty simple: as with any business relationship, you and your friends or associates can trade or deal in things of value for each other’s mutual benefit. Links, content, traffic and revenue are all things of value, so get creative and start making deals.

If you create a great piece of content and let somebody else use it, protocol dictates they have to give you a link crediting you as the original source. If somebody wants to blog about your content, same thing holds true. If you and a partner agree to occasionally mention or share each others’ content, you can not only increase each others’ visibility, but build quite a few reciprocal links.

Keep in mind that you should be careful about who you do this with. If their site is garbage, not only will you have to deal with their sub-par content, but their links will not help you much. Additionally, if you give out lots of links to bad sites, it can hurt the value of your links and your site. You should also request that ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ meta tags be used when your content is published on another site in order to avoid duplicate content issues with the search engines.

Meta robots tags for ‘noindex,’ ‘nofollow’ and various permutations thereof include:

Revenue and Information Sharing:

Much the same as with content, if you partner with someone, you can trade revenue on a project, data or information for links. Anything you have that is of value, whether it be actual money or competitive intelligence, is of value to someone else and worth a link (or several).

With any of these partnership tactics you should be careful of drinking too often from the same well. Reciprocal links between you and another site are fine, as long as they don’t appear manipulative to the engines. Search engines view habitual reciprocal links between domains as attempts to spam and less legitimate. As such, do some networking, cast a wide net and partner with lots of different people. It’ll not only benefit your link value and rankings, but your industry profile as well.