Links exchange is a great way to get two things coming to your site. One is customers, the other is the SE’s. The key to successful link exchange marketing is to keep it tight to the overall theme of your web site.
The main key to links is to trade links with sites that fit the theme of your site. Take a look at my coffee site. Down near the bottom you will find a links of interest link which takes you to an index of my link categories. You will notice that the links are with sites that are related to coffee. These would be things like Kitchen stuff, Dinning Room things, Coffee sites, Gourmet Foods, and other sites that are related in some manner to coffee, the theme of my site.
The other thing is to not link with what we call link farms. Link farms are sites that link with just about anything. They are easy to spot because before you ask for a link from a site you want to look at their links. If they are links that are relevant to their site and your link is relevant then you have a fit, pop them a message asking for a mutual link. See links that do not fit their theme, stay away and look at another site.
The second thing you want to do is have different kinds of links out there. You do not want to have the same link everywhere on the net. The SE’s notice this and it is partly how they end up ranking your site and what it has to do with. So using a variety of sample links that sites can put on their site is important. Even minor word changing is fine. Move a sentence around, change the alt text for the link, get as many variations as you can.
Next is how do you find links? Well you can do it the old fashioned way and go to a site similar to yours and start looking at the sites that they have in their links of interest area or use a SE. Follow the rules of are they relevant, are they a link farm, and if they like your site, they will probably link with you. Many sites have forms you can fill in or an email address specifically for links. I like to always tell them that I have added them and if they reply with where my link is located at I will make it permanent link. The formation of a good links letter can mean the difference between getting links and not getting them.
There are other alternatives to hunting up sites yourself. There are companies, such as mine that for a fee will find you links and keep finding them. One of the important things about links is it is an always going activity. The more links you get coming to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site. The more links on other sites the more important your site is to the WEB.
Customers going to one website DO look at links and follow them. While no endorsement is implied and even expressly denied, it means something to a browser that if they are good enough to be on this site they must be ok factor is in the mind of the consumers mind when they come to yours. My coffee site lives off of links with other sites. I track where clicks are coming from and most of them are through links with other sites.
The other way to get links is get a program that will search the web for you. A number of them are out there one that I happen to like is called Zeus . It can be programed with keywords that are relevant to your site, and even negative or exclusion words to look for. Basically you tell it what to look for, what to avoid, where to start and it goes out and follows links and ranks sites. If a site ranks well enough it puts it in a look at file. The speed it scours the net depends on your connection and a variety of factors but in no time at all you can have lots of incominge and out going links. Then you just need to look at the sites it finds and if they fit, it will send them your prepared email and even upload the links. Some will even do a pretty good job of tracking to make sure your links are still out there.
Sparky
If you’ve read this site or studied SEO, SERP, you’ve come across the term “Link Exchange” or “Backlaink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become such an important part of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.
What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks indicates the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a particular keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When there is a banklink to your site come from other sites, and those sites have information that is related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The relevant the inbound link, the greater their quality.
Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques such as automatically generated pages whose purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.
Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.
There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In a link exchange, one website places a link on their website that points to another website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.
We must be careful with our reciprocal links. You could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We should begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being as careful as we can with which websites we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.
Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are relevant to others, sometimes they are not. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.
There are a few things to consider when beginning your link exchange or backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks. There are tools to help you keep track of your backlinks and make links with other sites.
There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.
Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.
Sparky