Link trading is a popular method of strengthening your online presence. By exchanging links with other websites, you widen the reach of your site and become visible to more readers. The process is pretty simple on the surface - a webmaster links into your site, and you link to his. However, as search engines become smarter, they are also able to tell the difference between “good” links and “spam” links. In SEO 2.0, link exchange is much more complicated.

Getting on the good side of search engines

Relevant link trading is that it puts you in the good graces of search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. Ranking high on a search engines results page now takes more that mere search engine optimization— Google and Yahoo are also evaluating how popular and useful your site is by evaluating the links that are pointing to you. Simply put, if there are plenty of other websites that are pointing to your site, then you must have very important content.

The search for a link partner

The key to surviving Web 2.0 is to use only relevant links. However, it’s often hard to find a link exchange partner in the same field as your website, and even harder to find top-quality websites that are willing to go into a deal with you. It’s also difficult to get premium link placement. Many webmasters will just make you share the page with hundreds of other unrelated links.

Take your time

Although it might be enticing to accept all the link trading offers you receive, it’s important to take your time in deciding if accepting the deal will improve the traffic and quality of your site. For instance, if you are running a website about organic health food, it might not make sense to link to a butcher’s website.

Link Exchange 2.0

The best way to trade links is to enroll your website in a system that lets its members exchange relevant links. We have been successful in our own free link exchange system, which lets you take full control so you can block websites that you don’t want to partner with. Try it >>