A confederation of various websites which operate like a web ring is known as a link exchange. A central organization runs the entire exchange and the various webmasters register themselves and their website with it. After registering, each one gets an exchange HTML code which is interested into the web pages to displays banners advertisements for other websites which are also members of the same link exchange. ‘LinkExchange’ was the name of the earliest link exchange and it now works under Microsoft Corporation.
Link exchange has a number of advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand, they attract a greatly targeted readership and improve the ‘link popularity’ of websites with the search engines. On the flip side, they distract the customers away from the main website before it is explored completely to other websites.
Link building is one of the best solutions to increase the customer traffic on your website, to generate the interest of the customers and to make your website rank high in all search engines. It involves building high quality inbound links to one’s own website in order to make it popular with visitors as well as with search engines.
A number of free link building services exist which help websites in becoming a part of link exchanges and in this way, diverting much more traffic to their website from other sites. Also, there are some free link building softwares which not only help in building links but futher assist in staying competitive by comparing sites with websites of competitiors as well as in maintain exceptional track of one’s linking building campaign.
Link Exchanging is one of my main strategies while launching a new site, its crucial for a new site to get some links right after its launch to get some weight in the SERPs not just that but it also helps a heck lot to build up your pagerank, buying links could get pricey and no one likes to spend alot of money on new sites all that much these days so link exchanging is a good way to get some good links going on for your new site.
WAIT - Read the requirements for exchanging links
Now that you know just how important link exchanging is, you must know what exchanges you should take part in, here are my tips, its based on my personal experiences.
- Never accept links from blogspot, blogger, livejournal or any subdomain based blogs.
- Never accept links from people who want to give you links on a link page or a partner page
- Never accept a link from a site thats not relevant to yours
- Never accept a site that has alot of spam
- Never accept a link from a site that doesn’t rank at no.1 on its own name.
- Always look for relevancy, traffic and ofcourse PR.
Link Exchanging Forums
- Digital Point - Link Exchange
- Namepros - Link Exchange Requests
- Sitepoint - Link Exchanges
- Webmaster Talk Link Exchange
