The practice of effective link exchanges has nearly been extinguished by extensive amount of spam email. I plan to help webmasters who are interested in real effective and professional link exchanges reach there goal.

What is going to make you most amount of sales if you are trying to sell fishing equipment? A link from an outdoor hobby website or a link from a bubble gum corporation? I think answer is straightforward, outdoor hobby website. The trick is to know your market and understand your customer. What age group would your customers be, and what other type of website would they look at if they were interested in your product?

Now, put yourself in your customer’s feet, what would you search for if you were interested in your product? Type that search phrase into a search engine now and look at what results come up. Disregard competition and look at other websites.

I suggest you rate these websites in your head on following criteria: relevance, design, content, and navigation. I ordered them by how heavily you should consider them. I already discussed relevancy; because of course you want to bring customers to your website instead of click-happy people.

You may be asking yourself what a website’s design has to do with a link exchange. Well over years I have noticed one trend, which is that websites with a very nice design tend to prevail faster than others. Know one wants to visit a website and have to wince to read text. Content on other hand is what brings readers. Content can substantially improve quality of your website because internet is about information and if you have what people are looking for they will find you! Not other way around.

1) Robots - No webmaster that has worked hard on his (her or their) web site wants a robot coming around asking for a link exchange. In fact many consider this as spam and they are often offended by this.

2) Watch what you say! - When emailing web site owner you should never make mean comments or sound cold, like a robot. Make it more personal and that you are real a person and not an automated system.