Building relevance through link exchanges

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One of the oldest ways of building links to your site is through exchanging links. The procedure is quite simple. First, contact the owner of a website that has related content. Offer to provide a link to that site in exchange for a link to your site in return. Both sides post the proper link and everyone is happy. No cost, very little trouble and hopefully increased traffic to both sites.

Another advantage to the old-fashioned link exchange is to move your site up in the search engine rankings. Search engines endeavor to bring the "most relevant" results to the top. The trick of course is to determine what any given user will think of as relevant. Perhaps an example will help. Say a user enters "Britany Spears". Is the person looking for information on pop-singer or long pointy sticks used by British soldiers? The search engine has no way of knowing what a single user is really looking for. Instead, they try and find what most people would be looking for. One way to do this is to count how many links there are to a given web site. Websites with more links to them are more relevant. That is, more people find them interesting enough to link to.

Of course, this is not the only way the search engines determine relevance. But it is a cheap, easy and mostly painless way to build relevance. Of course, its not perfect and there are a few things to be aware of before accepting a link exchange offer. As you know, not everyone you meet on the Internet is honest and trustworthy.

First, the bait and switch. Remember, you do not have any control over the content of any other website. A person is free to put whatever content on a website. The entire content of the website can be changed at any time. It has happened that webmaster solicited link exchanges based on a certain content, say collectible dolls. Then, after having established a lot of links, the website is then changed to an adult website.

To overcome the bait and switch, it is necessary to regularly check the content of the sites you link to. If they have changed, you can then remove the links.

Second, no follow-through. The standard link exchange request says you post a link to my site and I will post to yours. Keep in mind that by exchanging links, you are hoping to increase your search engine relevance. The other guy is hoping to do the same. But, if he can get you to link to him with out reciprocating, then his relevance will be increased without increasing your own.

What do you do if the other guy does not follow-through? Again, check your links and make sure they link back to you. If not, remove them immediately.

Last, broken links. The Internet is always in motion. Pages come and pages go. People hate following broken links. As a webmaster, it is your responsibility to ensure the quality of the links you provide.

Again, check the links often and get rid of broken ones. Your readers will appreciate it.

The old-fashioned link exchange can be an effective means of increasing traffic to your website. It is simple, inexpensive and effective. However, it is important to remember the need to regularly check the links to make sure they are still good, still link back to you and still have content relevant to your readers.

An interesting alternative to a classic link exchange is "Rent my blog" over at Blog Explosion This allows you to have people link to you blog for a week in exchange for "credits". This system removes a lot of the problems mentioned above. Of course, it is only for a week. So renters will make a permanant link to your site from theirs. This allows you to build relevance without having to worry obout who you are linking to. Check it out if that sounds good to you.

To show you how link exchanges work, here are my link exchange links. Each one was relevant to the topic of making money on the Internet when I created the link. If you want to do a link exchange with me, just ask. It will be interesting to see which ones are still relevant by the time you read this:

Links related to make money on the Internet

• Top Paying Adsense Keywords - This site is for internet marketers who wish to find top paying adsense keywords to use for their adsense campaigns.

Link on all other topics

These are just links, not related to making money, but kind enough to have linked to me at one time.

• Nomads and Vagabonds Aren't we all somehow Nomads, Vagabonds, Roamers, Rovers, Pilgrims, Wanderers, Travellers, Tramps, Continental Drifters? What are you waiting for? Break the cycle, get out of the rat race, break the habit/social or peer pressure, downshift, trot the globe, walk this world, make new friends, retire young! ;-)
• Throw Back Land
• www.MyAirShoes.com

Tags: link, exchange, traffic, website, seo