Exchanging Links is Not Always Best Way

One of most prevalent ways to develop link popularity is by exchanging links. But it is not necessarily best way. First, exchanging links willy-nilly with anyone you can find willing to do so is not a good tactic. It doesn't help your site visitors if you link to irrelevant, poor quality sites. It makes your site look trashy. And it doesn't help your search engine ranking either. In fact, if you're exchanging links too carelessly you could be pegged as a link farm and actually banned from search engines.

The right way to exchange links is by finding quality, relevant sites with which to exchange links. These are links that search engines care about. But process of finding right sites and then convincing webmaster or site owner to exchange with you is a time consuming process. Time better spent, we believe, on building link popularity right way: natural way.

Link Popularity and Great Content Search engines include link popularity as part of their ranking algorithm based on theory that if you have great content, offer a valuable service, or sell a product people want, then people will naturally link to you. So what's wrong with doing just that? The first step to building better link popularity natural way is to improve your website. Spend time you would have spend searching for link exchange partners on creating sticky content for you site instead.

Press Releases If your company or website does anything even mildly noteworthy, write a press release and distribute it on web. There are several paid and free press release distribution services that will post your press release with a link back to your site. Take advantage of them.

Affiliate Programs Start an affiliate program. Offer to pay per click through or per sale that originates at your affiliate's sites. They'll link to you as affiliates and you'll have more inbound links.

Offer Free Articles or Tools Write articles in your area of expertise or create free web-based tools. Offer articles or tools free to anyone, and ask only for a link back as payment.

Let's face it, getting one-way, non-reciprocal links in to your site is way to go these days, at least as far as SEO purposes go. Reciprocal links can send you traffic, and may count for something in search engine ranking algorithms, but not nearly as much as they used to. To help you in search results, you have to get inbound links, preferably a text link with relevant text, from a site related to yours. Here are a few tips on getting those all-important inbounds.

It's doubtful, for new sites in particular, that you'll get another webmaster to link to you just for asking. Many won't even exchange links with low PR sites anymore, so your polite email request for a one-way link to your new PR 0 site may well be met with laughter.