SEO Tips: Building Links Through Link Exchange

Link exchange (exchanging links between sites to attain higher placement on search engines) is a effective site optimization techniques. Though it's not exactly as effective as it used to be a decade ago, it's still a very well working technique to establish authority of a website and improve its standing in the search engine rankings. Let's look at the exact steps that make for a no-hit link exchange campaign. Link exchange (as well as any link building means in that respect) is built-up on 2 things: quality and relevancy. You need to make sure that the websites you exchange links with are trusted and established sources on the web and are in the same niche as your website or are complementary in some way. That brings us to the first stage of linking campaign. Keyword Research To find relevant sites you need to set the keywords these sites can be found by. Take your general keyword list that you target in your search engine optimization campaign and enlarge it with search terms from neighboring markets. E.g. if your site is devoted to electric guitars, you can as well seed in key phrases that describe effect pedals, amps, musical theory, picks, recording gear, etc. As soon as you've made up a list of search terms you can move on to the second stage of link exchange. Looking For Link Partners Running a search on Google and other search engines is anobvious and a very efficient means to search for relevant link partners. Search for the keywords from your keyword list and you're sure to get scores of relevant options. Don't just focus on the first page of search results. In fact you would be better off starting with the second or third page, because web sites that are already at the top are less likely to be interested in link exchange. Pick The Best Link Partners Once you have got a list of relevant web sites it's just about the time to run the quality control. Although any relevant link is good for your search engine rankings, links are not valued equally. SEs tend to have more trust in .gov and .edu websites, so textual incoming links from these domains are more effective. Don't be obsessed with PR thoughremembering that it's just 1 of the factors in the search egnine ranking algo. It's not a bad idea to check the linking profile of a website, i.e. the sites it has links to and those that are linking to it. Exchange links only with websites that are not involved in a 'bad neighbourhood' and are not affiliated with shady websites. Generate Links To Your Link Partners Before you start sending out link exchange requests to admins of the web sites on your list it's recommended to act first and set up links to them from your site. Generate a partner directory with links to your potential link partners and mention it with the exact page URL, anchor text and description when asking for a link back. Contact Partners With Link Barter Requests Link barter requests are the type of email every webmaster gets daily. A lot of them are automatically generated by link exchange bots, therefore if you wish to improve your chances to secure a link try to sound as personal and specific as possibly. Address each person by her name, mention their site and by all means sound nice. Control Your Link exchange Efforts Getting a link back to your site is not yet the finish of the link exchange program. It's rather the start of a new step. Now you have to make sure that the link rests in place with the right anchor parameters. With hundreds of links it's not feasible to monitor them all by hand. The optimal way to check your links is with the help of some link exchange software. This way you can save a lot of time and monitoring your links quicker and more accurately. Such software is also quite useful on all other steps of link building: when looking for partner websites, assessing the link value, mailing out link exchange requests and so forth.