Link Trading

It’s a great idea to trade links with other websites that are relevant to your own. Why? Search engines, particularly Google, base their rankings in the search engine returns on how many websites are linked to your website. It also gives weight to the size and importance of the websites linked to your website. The more links you have and the more important the websites that are linked to you, the higher your ranking will be in the search-engine results. Naturally, your goal is to get to be the number one entry in the search-engine rankings or, at least, be someplace on the first page. The first page usually contains about 10 websites.

Moreover, there is another obvious reason why links from other websites can be important to you. Website visitors to other websites are likely to click on such links which will bring them to your website. So they have the potential of driving extra traffic to your website.

Create Your Links

When you ask another website to include a link to your website on one or more of its webpages, provide it with the link sentence and the link. The link sentence including the linking words should be constructed in such a way as to optimize being found by the search engines and getting a higher ranking in the search-engine returns.

Before you make a request to another website to trade links, take a look at that website and determine where you would like the links to your website to be. Then specify those webpages in your request. Of course, there is no certainty that the other website will grant your request, but it never hurts to ask. You also need to determine where on your website that you will put the reciprocal links. In addition, you have to determine what your policy will be for requests from other websites to have their links put on a special page in your website.

Getting Organized

Once you trade more than a few links, keeping your link trading organized presents a serious problem. Nonetheless you will want to keep a record of the links that you’ve traded. You will want to keep the other websites honest, just as they will want to keep you honest. Thus, periodically you will need to check up to see whether your links are still viable on their websites. Likewise, they will want to check up to see that their links on your website are still viable.

Hence, you need to develop a database to keep track of your link-trading relationships. However, there is an easier way. You can find linktrading software that will go a long ways towards automating the whole process for you. (Try Arelis at http://axandra.com.) Such software starts by finding other relevant websites on the Web with which you have a potential for establishing mutually beneficial reciprocal links. It also sends out and keeps track of email request letters. After such software gets you off to a good start in link trading, it also maintains your link-trading relationships.

Unfortunately the link-trading software does not necessarily eliminate work that must be done to set up and operate a link-trading program. It will take effort on your behalf or on the behalf of one of your employees. Still, the software will make your work more efficient and shorter in duration than if you tried to do this without software support.

Link-Trading Circles

Don’t join a link-trading circle where everyone in the group trades links with every other member of the group. Some of the search engines, particularly Google, can detect such an arrangement. When it does detect such an arrangement, you may go to the bottom of the search-engine rankings or even disappear altogether. So, you need to establish your link trades individually with a one-onone relationship.

A good policy to follow is to communicate with your link-trading partners periodically. One way to do this is to provide your link-trading partners with statistics regarding the number of click-throughs that they get from your website. Your periodic communication will remind them that you are still partners, and they are a lot less likely to inadvertently or purposely erase your links on their websites. In addition, it’s a friendly gesture to keep the door open for future discussions about how you might cooperate. Indeed, occasionally you will want to review your partnerships with these other websites to determine what other mutually beneficial relationships you can create.

Banner Trading

You can do the same thing with banners that you do with links. That is, you can trade them. After all, banners are nothing but graphics with a link in them.

A good way to get off to a good start with a new website is go on a linktrading campaign, and attempt to establish as many reciprocal links as possible. You don’t have to do it that way, however; you can do it piecemeal. You can find a few trades every week and someday that effort will add up to a lot of reciprocal-link trades. But the point is to start it now.

The Guru’s Viewpoint

The search engine guru that I consult with believes that reciprocal links don’t work well for getting found by the search engines. Oneway links work much better according to him. In other words, if you can arrange links from another website to your website without reciprocation, the search engines will give you a boost. How do you accomplish this? You work hard at it. It helps to have a great website.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

This is a technique to increase your website traffic that requires only your time and a little bit of software. It’s not something you have to do all at once, and it needn’t take a huge front-end effort. It’s something you can do a little bit at a time, and that will eventually build into something big. This is a valuable technique that you do not want to overlook.

If you are not optimizing your website for the search engines, however, link trading is less valuable. It may not be cost-effective purely as a means of building traffic via links from other websites.