Link Exchange

Link Exchanges

Introduction to Link Exchange
The basic idea of link exchanges are websites that have related content or services (it's not absolutely necessary to have related fields though) but more complimentary rather than competing each other, help each other by exchanging links. The link exchange should be free to both parties of an agreement. That's the basic premise of it.

Back in the early days, links were used in a straightforward manner to help visitors find relevant information through one’s website. And it was always linked to related sites. As the importance of links increased due to search engine optimization, links have since been used to help sites rather than visitors.

A Brief History

This all began when big G (that is Google) came up with the concept of “PageRank” as a method of classification based off relevance and importance. The importance of a site increases by links that point to it, and the importance is correlated to the significance of the pointing site. This lends significant weight to the ratio, affecting Google's search results.

These days, PR has suddenly become a new and very important factor to choose link exchange partners. Many sites in search of more and more traffic started placing more relevance on “PR”.

Tips and Tricks for Link Exchange:

1) To locate potential reciprocal link exchange partners, go to Google and type in words related to your website content and niche. Take a bit of time to visit each website that you locate and consider to be potential link exchange partners. Would be great if you could find link exchange partners with PageRank of 7 and upward (but that's getting tougher by the day).

2) Link exchanges are mostly free (we'll talk about paid ones later on) so don't be afraid to just drop sites which you fancy to be your link exchange partners an email. Look for their contact details on their main site. If you don't find it, look under their WHOIS information.

3) One way links are much better than 2 way reciprocal links. As such, spend more time on getting one way links. You can obtain some pretty good one way links via blog commenting and article marketing. Btw, USFreeAds gives us backlinks as well. Be creative! ;)

4) Google frowns on getting paid 1 way links to your site but hey, it works for many sites and for most of the part, Google won't know which are paid and which are free links (btw, they aren't God).

5) Be nice and work towards a win-win situation when you approach other sites for link exchanges. Especially if their PR is way higher than yours.

6) Getting backlinks from external sites (through link exchange) carries 2 advantages. Firstly of course would be to get you additional traffic but secondly, it's to increase your pagerank which acts to increase the value of your site and its page on the whole.

7) Riding on point #6, if you do your link exchange right and by that, I mean you use your target keywords as your anchor keyword, you increase your search engine optimization for your site in the process. And that's the 3rd advantage which wasn't mentioned earlier.

8) Try adding your site links on link exchange directories ... Some are divided on this though. Try and see if it works for you.

9) Some webmasters like to use automatic link exchange scripts to make the job simpler.

Improving Search Engine Exposure:

When a link is passed from one website to another, it passes some of its PageRank (in the process) to the other without undergoing any loss in its own PageRank. This help in boosting the PR of the backlinked site thus boosting the search engine position. This in turn gets the back linked site a better rank helping it get more free targeted traffic. The same logic works pretty much the same way in the typical office. The more people endorse you, the faster you promote. ;)

Myths of Link Exchange:

Some say that putting up a reciprocal link with an irrelevant website will be of no use i.e. if your website deals in golfing equipment, building any kind of reciprocal link with a financial website will not help. Therefore a suitable link partner has to have similar or complementary content. I don't quite agree with this though. A link is still a link. Granted, there won't be as many targeted traffic clicking through from an unrelated site. Also, some say that automatic link exchange scripts don't work but they actually do.

Happy link exchanging!