A Successful Link Exchange

By: Michael McLaughlin

Interested in boosting your link popularity, raising your Google PR, and improving the amount and quality of your traffic? Then discover the ancient secrets of a successful link exchange!

The practice of effective link exchanges has nearly been extinguished by the 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 the 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 the answer is straightforward, the 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 the competition and look at the other websites.

I suggest you rate these websites in your head on the 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 the 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 the text. Content on the other hand is what brings the readers. Content can substantially improve the quality of your website because the internet is about information and if you have what people are looking for they will find you! Not the other way around.

Content is king, how many times has that been said? And it still holds true, content is what get websites links back to them, which in turn raise a websites presence on the internet. So why not have a link from a content website, in opposition to just another website trying to sell something?

And of course a websites navigation must be search engine friendly, because you will prefer to have the location of your link to be indexed by search engines.

Basically you should try to pick your link partners by first eliminating the irrelevant links, and then choose a website that is search engine friendly and has the potential to grow! And remember look for quality websites not high PR websites.

One of the first signs of maturity in a person’s life is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. For example you hit a car in the parking lot and don’t leave insurance information, you later feel bad because you know if that was your car that got hit you would be angry about it. Get the point? Good now apply that to writing emails; put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

Do you want to open another email that is titled “link exchange” or would you perhaps prefer to read something a bit more refreshing and alluring entitled “our partnership” or “link opportunity” be creative but don’t stick with the old link exchange title that is highly overused.

The content of this email, however you entitled it should be very professional and businesslike. Use proper punctuation and complete sentences, also remember to compliment part of there website that is distinguishable so they identify that you actually visited it instead of simply finding there email address in cyberspace.

Don’t trust what mom says “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” True content does help a website grow, but rarely do I trust a websites content if its design is pitiful. Remember be picky when choosing a link partner, personalize your letter, and be professional. As a final point do not partake in spam email!

About the Author: Written by: Michael McLaughlin at http://www.webmastershed.com – webmaster forum, for more articles by this author please visit: http://www.webmastershed.com/articles