I don't have to explain anymore that to positioning well in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you must get as many high quality back links as you can. There are many ways to get these links; one of the oldest is by offering reciprocal link. Despite the fact that many SEO experts said that reciprocal links are less important to search engines these days, they are still worthwhile to be collected.

Here are the reasons:

• They increase the visibility of your website (research shows that links from popular websites bring some visitors and search engine spiders to your website).
• They increase your Google Page Rank.
• They increase your position in Search Engine Result Pages.

So, how could you find any websites to exchange links with? Easy, just analyze your competitors' back links! You can use Google for this purpose. Try using "link: your_competitor_url" as a keyword, and it will show all your competitors' back links. For example if your competitor' URL is www.just4sample.com, you can analyze its back links by using "link: www.just4sample.com" as a keyword in Google.

While this method is easy and effective to analyze the competitors' back links, many people dislike it since they cannot see which back links are worthwhile to be collected (it's no longer a secret that everyone is only interested with websites that have decent Google Page Rank). Just imagine, to checking those back links' Page Ranks, you will have to load each of them and then check their Page Ranks in Google Toolbar! Aren't there any simpler methods?

Actually there are! You can choose to use magnificent tools such as SEO Elite (unfortunately you will have to purchase it first), or utilizing free online tools such as Page Rank Search from SeoChat (www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/). I believe most of you will prefer the second method.

Below is the image of the Page Rank Search tool from SeoChat. As you can see, there are no much differences with Google SERPs. The obvious difference is that it now shows the back links' Page Rank. Another difference is that you can check every back link's back links by clicking "View Inbound Links". The good news is, this tool works exactly the same as Google. You can still use "link: competitor_url" to analyze your competitors back links. Unfortunately, there is also bad news. This tool only shows the first 100 links; there is no paging like Google (I don't know this is a bug or not; but when it was first available a couple of years ago, there was no limit like this).