To check out your site's Page rank, download Google Toolbar from http:/ oolbar.google.com/ and install. After that, go to your website. On tool bar, you will see rank of your index page in a scale of 0 to 10. The rating is considered good if it is five or more.

Make sure, while exchanging links you select websites that have page rank no less than yours.

How to find websites that you should swap links with?

The easiest way is to check out backward links to website of your most prominent Internet based competitor or industry leader of your field. Other option is to run a search based on most relevant keywords to your website and check out backward links to first ten websites.

In search box of Google, Altavista and AllTheWeb type link: and then URL of site to view all sites that have backward links to this site. Visit these sites to find best one to exchange links and then contact them with a nice email.

I will also suggest you to check out number of visitors site receives before offering a link swap. The tool that will help you figuring out quantity of traffic a site gets, you can download from http://download.alexa.com/ by clicking on button “Free Tool Bar”. This is also a very good tool to analyze web traffic. The tool also shows which other similar sites people tend to visit alongside with site that you are viewing now.

If a site gets significantly less visitors than yours, what is point of having a link form that site?

While looking for websites to swap links, don’t forget about your partners, suppliers and buyers. These sites are capable of bringing major traffic and are indeed relevant to your site’s subject matter!

Your link popularity campaign should also include following methods. However, mind it, these techniques require tedious work from your side.

Issue Press Releases

Press releases are a good way of exposing your website to mass and increase your link popularity. Whenever you are coming up with a new product or service, overhauling your website, adding new elements to your site or conducting a seminar, etc. you should issue a press release. It is also a very cost effective method of getting publicity for your site. To broadcast your press release you can use one of free media release sites: http://www.prweb.com

Write Articles

If you are dedicated to popularize your website, you must have substantial knowledge of subject related to your website. Why not, write articles on your subjects of expertise and circulate them on Internet and post on your website? Apart from this will add good content to your website, if other websites and newsletters publish your articles, you will get free publicity and increase your link popularity.

Build an Affiliate Program

If you sell a product or service through your website, you should seriously consider developing an affiliate program for your site. An affiliate program is when a visitor from your affiliate’s site comes to your site using link that you provided to affiliate and buy something; affiliate will get a commission from you. The affiliate program can expand your business substantially. Since your affiliates require posting your links on their sites, this increases your link popularity as well.

Participate in Discussion Groups and Forums

This is also a great way of increasing your link popularity. There are literally thousands of discussion groups and forums on every conceivable subject on Internet. You should actively participate in some of them, those which are most relevant to your area of expertise. The signature along with your website address that you post there while asking a question or answering to a question also boosts your link popularity.

Link Exchange Programs

You can also participate one of link swap programs available on Internet. Unfortunately, most of automated link exchange offers that you receive through them are random and irrelevant to your site. But, however, I would suggest you to give them a try, as chances are there that you still might receive some good offers. You can also actively search for sites to swap links in their directories.

Development of link popularity is an on going process. You have to work on this constantly. But, outcome that you might achieve from your endeavor also could be significant.

Get an online presence

What should be your next step once you have all your products transformed into e-catalog? Naturally, you need to have an online presence to sell products. There are number of options how to do this.

Become a member of an e-marketplace

This could be a large geography oriented fairly large horizontal market or a vertical e-marketplace specific to your industry. The membership fees are in most of cases not so expensive. But many of them charge some percentage on your transactions, usually, from 1 to 3 percent. If you expect big sales volume, you may think this might not be best choice for you. However, if you get new customers, thanks to your mere presence in an e-marketplace, percentage that you have to pay on transaction you should consider as customer acquiring cost. Under any circumstances, it is good to become a member of at least one e-marketplace as you -automatically get exposed to thousands of new prospective customers.

Build a website

There are several ways you can construct an e-commerce site to your need.

You can build a website in house by employing developers or you can hire a web development company to do this for you. The advantage is you can have a website with look, feel and functionality according to your given specification.

However, both of these methods could be way costly for a small business. Average cost of building an e-commerce website runs starting from US$ 600 plus hosting and maintenance charges for a miniscule site with limited features to several hundred thousand US Dollars for a powerful e-commerce website.

Another option that you have as a small business is to build an e-commerce site from prefabricated templates. While this is affordable and easy, you considerably lose flexibility and customization possibilities in comparison to building a site from scratch.

Build a web store

All these above mentioned cases do not allow you to have potentials and advantages that come with an e-business website integrated with a B2B exchange. Which means, whether you are a business to consumer company with occasional sales to businesses or you are a pure play B2B company, a Web Store merged into an e-marketplace is what you need.

A web store from a B2B exchange gives you best of both worlds. You are having a professional e-commerce site which incorporates all features that an e-marketplace has to offer. And you build a site from simple and easy to edit templates.

For a detailed information about features that come with a web store and benefits that you can get from them, follow this link: Powerful E-business Store