Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Link Exchanges, Are They Worth It?

By Shep Samson


Link exchanges can be a viable way to promote your online business. Whether you are just starting out with your first website, or an experienced webmaster, if you haven't tried link exchanges, you may want to consider it. Exchanges are a combination between traffic exchanges and affiliate marketing programs.

A link exchange offers you the chance to share your links with other sites, and in return they get to place their links on your site creating a mutual exchange. Some new opportunities exist that allow you to do this through an exchange site, but most of the time you will have to contact target sites directly and ask the site's webmaster for an exchange of links to be done. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Try both and see which best fits your needs.

The benefit to using a link exchange company is that you are sharing traffic with other sites who are, by your choice, going to get you targeted traffic that can better match the goals of your business. It can be less time consuming than manually asking website owners to do an exchange. The more link partners you gain, the better visibility you have for your site. And, as you know more visibility means more traffic, and more traffic means more sales.

It is important that you are aware of a couple of things about link exchanges however. The first is that these will often require a lot of start-up work, contacting webmasters and setting the whole process up. Beyond that, you have to be able to monitor the effectiveness of each link you place. You don't want to have a bunch of links out there doing nothing for your website. So getting link exchanges and maintaining them can be a good thing, but you will have to decide whether the work is paying off or not.

Another important aspect is that you want targeted link exchanges relating to your website niche. For instance if your website is about dogs, you wouldn't want link exchanges about real estate. You would want topics that are about dogs and interest to dog owners. You obviously would want to try to link with sites that have higher page rankings than your site does to boost your site's page rank in the process. Not always easy to do.

There are great free directories that you can list your website in as well, to provide one way links. One of the biggest goals of link exchanges is to boost your search engine ranking to order to gain organic website's traffic.

There are some who have argued that these agreements actually take traffic away from your site by encouraging visitors to click a link before they buy anything from you. While this may be true in some cases, it is not the standard. On the other hand, the increased traffic from search engine rank improvement that you may gain by doing quality link exchanges, most likely will offset any possible loss of sales.

Many web owners have found great success with link exchanges and would not do without them. Again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be advantageous to your business or not, and if it will be worth it once you've got it up and running. Give it a few months however to test the results because they do not come overnight.

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