Graphics and sets - In a manner similar to publishing articles, some artists create with is known as linkware. These are images and sets of images which may be used as long as a link is return to their site. Again, this is NOT a link exchange. It is exceptionally good as a linking method, as it's quite common for people to find a graphic they like and follow link back to artists site to see what else is available.

Affiliates - If you've created a good product, it is an excellent idea to also form an affiliate plan to get other people selling your products for you. Each of these salespeople will be adding links to your site so they can sell your products and collect their commissions. This has obvious linking benefit combined with possibility of making some money.

Exchanging links - Perhaps most overt reason is also very simple: two webmasters simply agree to add a link to each other's site to their sites. Exchanging links just to exchange links is perhaps among worst reason of all. This is often done just to increase search engine rankings. Usually traffic from this form of linking is very poorly targeted and produces few return visits or sales.

Link farms - Quite some time ago, some intelligent people figured out they could boost their search engine ranking by creating pages of links, then distributing those pages to as may other webmasters who could tolerate them. This worked for a while, but eventually search engines caught on. In fact, they now will often drop a site from their index entirely if a link farm is discovered. At best, link farm pages will be dropped from index. At worst, whole site will be banned.

Link Automation products - Several products exist which allow webmasters to manage their link pages. These are intended to promote link exchanges by automating search for sites of desired themes, as well as handling administration of emailing other webmasters.

The problem is that these programs have now become associated with spam (both email and search engine spam) due to poor documentation and abuse by individual webmasters. In addition purpose of products is to create link exchanges, which is not best form of linking or promotion. There is also a large amount of anecdotal evidence that some search engines will penalize or ban entirely a site which uses them in an unchanged form.

Conclusions - Getting links to their site is one of most critical tasks that all webmasters will confront. It is so critical that it must be done correctly or a site's traffic will suffer (and sometimes drop dramatically). A very good link could mean tens of thousands of visitors who click on it directly, as well as tens of thousands more from higher search engine rankings that result.

So work on both getting and receiving links, and remember there is no need to "do a link exchange". Simple add appropriate, well-themed links to your site, and give others some incentive to add your links to theirs.

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