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Links & Traffic | Article #22: LINK EXCHANGES

Before I decided to write this article, I did a little research to see what the general population thought about Link exchanges. So I read some articles myself, just to make sure that my own theories on the subject matched everybody else's. Well, I can happily say that most people seem to be in agreement with me as far as how to go about link exchanges.

For those who don't know, a link exchange is just what it sounds like. I assume if you have a web site, you have a link to it, otherwise nobody is going to be able to find it. Of course if you just have a domain and no hosting yet, well, that's another story. But we'll assume that you have a functioning web page. A link exchange is where you offer to put another site's link on your web page in exchange for them putting your link on their page. In theory, this sounds simple. In practice, not so.

As with banner exchanges, people want to know what is in it for them. So if you've got a site that's Alexa ranked around 1 million, don't expect a site in the top 1000, or even top 10,000 to be interested in a link exchange. Let's face it. What's in it for them? So when you start out, you want to look for sites that are in the same niche as yours that have relatively the same popularity.

Now, if you're thinking this isn't going to help you, you're wrong. See, search engines base a certain portion of your site popularity in how many incoming links you have from other sites. So even if this sites are not that popular themselves, all the incoming links you get from them will raise your site's popularity. Then, over time, you can do link exchanges with more popular sites. Yes, this is a slow process, but over time, very effective.

When you go to a site, you want to make sure that it's a quality site. Exchanging links with a crappy site isn't going to do you any good. Also, you want to manually visit the site and contact the owner through the site contact page. Don't go through these link farms or services that get you a zillion links in a day. They will bury you with the search engines. You have to do this manually and one link at a time. I suggest trying to get at least 1 link a week, but, you don't want to get more than 10% of the total links to your site through this method. So find other ways of getting incoming links, like through article writing.

Link exchanges aren't going to get you tons of traffic overnight. This is a day to day process. But, if you keep at it, over time, you will start to notice a decent increase in traffic.

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