Website Marketing Tips - Tip #1: Exchanging Links

  When it comes to website marketing, one of the methods that's talked about quite often is that of exchanging links.

While as little as a year ago, this was one of the preferred methods of website marketing, it has lost quite a bit of value.  It used to be that the more people you could trade links with the more visibility your website would receive.

While exchanging links (also called reciprocal linking or trading links) does still work, it's not as effective as it used to be in website marketing.  However, you can still use them to your advantage.

First, let's talk about what exchanging links is in relation to website marketing.

Let's say you have a website about wedding gowns.  You don't have the website traffic you'd like to see and so you decide to head out and find other websites related to the topic of your website that would be willing to trade a link with you.

This means that you would offer to place a link on your website in exchange for another website linking back to you.

So how are you supposed to market your website using reciprocal linking if it's no longer as viable as it used to be?  Here are some tips to help you out in that regard.

1. Be sure that the website you want to exchange links with hasn’t been banned by the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple but very important step.
   
   To find out if a website has been banned, simply head over to Google and in the search box enter the following:
   
   site:www.thesiteyourconsidering.com
   
   If nothing shows up, they’ve been blacklisted or banned by the search engines so don’t even think of trading links with them. You’ll go downhill faster than a snowball on ice.
   

2. Be sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is on a related topic as yours. You don’t want to trade links with a site about Pizza if your site is about flowers.
   
   Also, be sure that the site you'll be linking to would be complimentary to yours and offer your site visitors an added benefit that you don't offer on your website.
   

3. Keep the link trading at a minimum. Be sure you’ve got some natural incoming links as well that aren’t requiring a link back to you. You need to keep the two balanced out.
   
   Try and keep the amount of reciprocal links on your site to only about 10% of the overall links contained on your site.
   

4. Be sure that the page you want to link to has a PageRank. Obviously the higher the better, but any kind of PageRank means that they’ve been around for some time; at least long enough for Google to know that they’re online.
   

5. Fifth, don’t be shy. Do a search on your topic of interest and take a look at who is listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo and simply ask if they’d be willing to exchange links with you.
   
   I don’t recommend you doing this until you’ve had your site up for quite some time, and have plenty of good, relevant content on it. You don’t want to be spamming these sites either. Send a simple and polite request to the webmaster, if they don’t respond in a week or so, then wait and do it again in another month.
   
   If they still don't respond, don't send another link request for a few months. 
   

This website marketing tip will begin to move your website in the right direction. 

Don't forget to check out our other website marketing tips contained here on the website and implement each one to help in your website marketing efforts.

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