One of the most important aspects to gaining a better position in the search engine rankings is by increasing the number of back links to your site. Natural linking to your sites content is the theoretically the best type of link you can get. The belief is that, if another related site is linking back to content on your site, it is in essence giving a positive vote for your site’s content. In professional SEO circles this type of link is called a citation.
Many site owners simply can’t wait for their site to be discovered naturally by other site owners. So of the many strategies that are used, link exchanges are a way to speed up this process.
Essentially a link exchange occurs when one site owner solicits a link from another site owner. The key to a good link exchange is to solicit links from sites that are in some way related to the content of your site. But not all link exchanges are created equally and in the eyes of Google, some link exchanges can be seen as web spam. So how can you find quality link exchange opportunities?
One way is to use sites that specialize in link exchanges. There are several membership sites that provide an opportunity to exchange links with other sites that have the same interest. This makes finding other webmasters to exchange links with simple. Most provide a standard email template that will notify the webmaster of the site from which you are requesting a link exchange. They can respond to your request – and most will because they are also members of the exchange site – and you have nearly instant link juice.
Another way is to search on the keywords you are targeting in the major search engines and visit each site that comes up in the top 25-50 listings. You should create a template email to send to each of the webmasters of the sites requesting a link. Don’t just send a generic email though. Make sure you at least look over the site and include some reference to their content in your request. In some cases a site will already have a reciprocal link program in place. You should also look for these programs when you are browsing the listings.
A third strategy that can be used is to set up a Google Alert for your most valuable keywords. When your alert comes, browse the sites that are listed and watch for new sites – blogs, forums, communities, etc. – and inquire on exchanging links with them.
Ultimately you should be picky about who you exchange links with. A good quality link is always more valuable than having a large volume of links. Though you may only get a handful of replies from prospective web sites, these three simple techniques will help speed up the development of links to your site and will help your site move up in the SERPs.
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As far as I am concerned, I always aim for traffic when exchangin links rather than SEO benefits. Sure, exzchanging links can help from a SEO perspective, but you definitely shouldn’t go over-board.
Alan Johnson
Great article. Its hard to determine where to draw the line between quantity and quality though.