Link Exchanges

How To

Link exchanges are one of the most important thing you can add to your website to generate traffic.  What follows are a few tips of how to do link exchanges.

Decide on Categories

When setting up your links pages, think carefully about what categories may be related to your website.   Try to limit the total categories to 10 or less and then begin looking for potential link partners.  The key using link exchanges is to only exchange links with sites related to yours.  For example, my website is about long distance telephone service.   Since I am also going after business long distance traffic my site is loosely related to business telephone services.  So on my links page I have links related to business telephone systems and repairs.

I do maintain a Miscellaneous links exchange page.   There are sites that I choose to exchange with even though they are not related to my site at all.  Often the reason is nothing more than I am trying to help out a friend with his site or just simply because I was asked and I happened to like the site.   Even if you do have a Misc links page, after you have enough, try to categorize them into groups also.  What ever happens, DO NO create a link page with hundreds of unrelated links on the same page.  Doing so WILL hurt your search engine rankings.

Your Responsibly as a Link Exchange Partner

Bear in mind, that you have a responsibility to your link partners.  When you ask for a link exchange you are agreeing to drive traffic to their website.   Be sure to add meta keywords and descriptions tags. 

One of my link pages is about refurbished telephones.   Even though I do not sell telephones, as of this writing, my Google rank for the keywords Refurbished Telephones is 7.  My link exchange partners for that page get the benefit of LDFacts.com driving traffic to their sites.

Make it easy for people to request links with you. 

On every one of your link pages be sure to have a link to a page that tells webmasters how to request a link from you.  On this page provide the potential link exchange partner with the code you expect them to use to link to your site.  Here is an example from LDFacts.com

**************************************************************************************************************

Sample Link 2

Cheap Long Distance and Long Distance Facts -  Find the best long distance rates available anywhere.  Free internet calculator to compare rates for your specific area of the country.

Use this code

**************************************************************************************************************

I provide a few sample codes for them to choose from.  This makes it easier for them to fit me into one of their categories.

Do not be afraid of saying "NO" to a link request.

Because of my personal views there are certain categories that I will not exchange links with.  But there are other reasons not to exchange links. 

1. Not related to your site in anyway.

2. Google has banned them. - No Page Rank on home page.

3. They are producing a "Link Farm" of hundreds of links that are not categorized.

Swapping links with these site may not just have zero value, it may also hurt you with the major search engines.  A fairly good rule of thumb is if the page the webmasters wants to put you on has as least some Google Page Rank and doesn't violate the three rules above, then it may be a decent site to exchange links with.

Put your ads on your link exchange pages.

On you link exchange pages you need to be sure that the people that view these pages are seeing an ad for the products YOU sell.   I'll put a banner ad or more for long distance on each page.  Since I also sell web hosting services, on my web services link exchange page I also link to my hosting pages or use my affiliate links.  Anyone who uses your link pages should also be seeing ads for related products that you are selling.