First thing you must do is find a web site that you would like to trade links with. How do you find them? You can join link exchanges like www.linkexchangeit.com or you can search search engine with keywords related to your site. Remember RELATED sites only! Let's say your site is about cars, so you would search with keywords like car body repair, car, SUVS, trucks, vans, etc or let's say your site is about games, so you would search with keywords like checkers, card games, chess, online games, etc. Now that you know what to do go and search for sites RELATED to yours and ask for a link exchange.

You could send them this email below if you like.

Dear (Put there name here),

Thanks for taking time to read my email.

The Problem As with many rules/laws eventually people found a way to manipulate it. Sites were created solely to build link popularity of other sites. These sites are called ‘Link Farms’ and contributed to pollution of search engine results. They increased search engine rankings of many sites that did not deserve position they received.

Eventually search engines caught on to this deception and some such as Google adjusted their algorithms accordingly. Google now penalizes websites associated with Link Farms imposing penalties they deem appropriate based on site and scenario. Many people that felt effects of this penalization were fairly innocent, well that is if you consider ignorance to be an alibi. They simply did not know that what they were doing was wrong; some even paid for SEO services and were victims of bad services.

As search engines change their algorithms aiming to reduce fraudulent activities by webmasters, more and more ways are conceived to manipulate them, and so battle continues.

An Honest Link Building Strategy Getting quality links to your site from related resources is not always as easy as some make it sound. The key word here is ‘quality’. It is a very time consuming process and involves following steps:

* Search for quality sites that are related to yours. * Contact Webmaster of related site. * Wait for a response from them. * Swap links if response is positive.

There are also some automated methods of doing this that speed up process, however, I would not recommend any of them and hence won’t list them in this article.

So you have started your link building campaign and are hopefully seeing results. Now you say this is great but how can I make this process more efficient and effective without risking your good standings with search engines.

Here is solution.