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Exchanging links with other web sites is what the web is all about. This can be a fairly good way attract visitors to your site but more importantly it can ( if done in moderation ) help with your search engine ranking. One of the major attributes that search engines use in deciding how high up the listings to places your pages is the number and quality of other sites which link to yours. ( see the section of Search Engines for further information ). First a couple of considerations, - The whole point of exchanging links is so that more people come to your site. However if as soon as they come they spot something more interesting then they will leave before reading what you really want them to. It is therefor vital that by exchanging links with other sites you don't deteriorate the quality or content of your own site. One of the simplest and easiest ways to do this is to create a "Webmasters Resource Page" and have a small link to this page from your home page. This does two things, it means that just a small area of your home page is sacrificed and the sites that you exchange links with will see that you are placing their link just one click away from your home page
( i.e.. not buried deep within a hard to find part of your site ). - Remember if you bury their link, they will almost certainly do the same to yours. In addition you do not want your site to appear just like another free for all Links page, this is both bad for when search engines are judging your site and when other webmasters are deciding whether to exchange links with you.
Who to Exchange With.
You need to be targeted in your approach and this means You need to exchange links with sites where Your type of Customers visit. Now obviously your direct competition will already be attracting these customers, but it is probably not a good idea to exchange links with them. Unless they are already near the top of the search engine results, you will be enhancing their position ( link popularity ) and also introducing a potential customer to a direct rival. ( There is however a case for linking to competition which is already near the top of the search results - see the Search Engine section for this ). You need to think about both your Product and the Subject Area of your product. Try and think what else will people interested in your product be doing online. Let's suppose your product just so happens to be a book about "Deep Sea Fishing" then people who would be interested in this book would also be the type of people who are looking to buy Deep Sea Fishing Rods and Tackle. So go to a search engine and see which sites you can find which sell Fishing Rods and Tackle. Visit each site, if you believe this to be a quality site then find the email address of the web master. Before you Approach
Once you have found a site you would like to exchange links with, place a link to their site from your resources page. Placing the link first overcomes their fear that you won't actually reciprocate or give them a quality link. How to Approach Webmasters
Think about the type of emails you get and which of those you read and which you delete. If you're like me you receive plenty of spam, by now you know the type of email just from the subject line, which you simply delete before reading. This is what you have to avoid, you need to create a subject line that will encourage the other web master to at least read your message. ( "I visited your site..." or "business opportunity" is not going to do it ). You could try the direct approach "I want to Exchange Links with You", but far more effective is something about their site i.e.. mention one of their products in their title e.g.. "Your Deep Sea Fishing Rods". They have to open it and read it because you may be a potential customer.
( Notice the maybe, don't create a subject line that lies e.g.. "I want to buy your Fishing Rod" - this will just put them in a bad mood when they find out they haven't really made a sale - know that feeling ? ). Begin the email with something like "I visited you site and noticed that you sell Deep Sea Fishing Rods and Tackle.....". You then don't want to waffle too much, just come straight to the point, detail your product in a one liner and explain that you think your visitors would also be interested in their site and would they like to exchange links with you. You should then detail the page where you have placed a link to their site and that if you do not hear back from them within a couple of days you will assume a negative response and remove their link. Emphasize that this is a quality link just one click away from your home page. Monitoring
Although it would appear that this is all there is to it,it isn't. It is now vital that you know how many visitors are coming from all your link exchanges. Your links may be buried, or removed after only a couple of weeks. You are giving them a quality link and so you deserve one in return. ( Why send your visitors to sites that aren't sending you any ? ) The only sensible way to do this is via Visitor Tracking and again the TrafficFile Gold Service does this for you. With this service you get detailed reports about which sites sent you visitors, then number they sent you and on which days they sent them. This enables you see in an instant whether a site has dropped or buried your link and whether a site was worth exchanging links with at all. In addition, if you do suddenly find that the visitors from particular site have dropped, you will have the evidence at hand to approach them and ask them what is going on. It may be that they have dropped your link by accident ( sloppy page editing - it happens ) and your approach will mean a resumption in visitors from that site. This you can only know and do if you are monitoring and analyzing your Visitors - TrafficFile Gold Service. By dropping the sites from your resource page that aren't sending you any visitors you maintain the quality of your resources page enabling you to acquire more quality links. Think about it, would you rather exchange links with someone who links to 100 other sites on that page or with someone who just has a handful of Quality links ? Finding out who links to your Competitors.
A good way to find sites to exchange links with is by finding out who is already linking to your competitors. If a site is already linking to one of your competitors then you can be assured of two things, 1) they are prepared to exchange or place links and 2) they are interested in the subject area of your site. The followin FREE tool will help find who is linking to who ( also useful for checking who is linking to you ! ) http://www.linkpopularity.com
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