Link exchanges are different from other methods of marketing you may have already done. Whether you’re just getting started with your first online business, of if you are experienced, if you haven’t tried link exchanges, you might be missing out on great marketing strategies.

These exchanges are something of a cross between traffic exchanges and affiliate marketing programs. However the way you get into them and the way they work are a bit different.

To begin, an exchange offers the opportunity to have another site place your link on their website, in return you place a link of their website on yours. There are resources out there that allow you to make these requests through an exchange site. The other method is to contact webmasters directly of sites you would like to exchange links with and ask if they are interested in doing so. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, so you’ll need to find which fits your needs the best.

The benefit of being a member of a link exchange is that you are sharing traffic with other sites who are, by your selection, going to give you targeted traffic appropriate to the goals of your business. The more exchange partners you accumulate, the better visibility you have for your site. And, as you know already, more visibility means more traffic, and more traffic means higher sales.

You need to be aware of a few of things about link exchanges however. The first is that there will often be a need to do a lot of start-up work, contacting webmasters and setting the process up. After that, you would want to be able to monitor the effectiveness of each link you place. There are some great resources out there to help you do so. You don’t want a bunch of links out there doing nothing for your website. Gaining link exchanges and maintaining them can be a good thing, but you will have to decide whether the time involved is paying off.

Another important fact is that you want targeted link exchanges relating to your website niche. For example if your website is about business, you wouldn’t want a link exchange about hair styles (unless that business is related uniquely to that market). You would want topics that are about business and interesting to business owners. Search engines tend to view these unrelated type of links unfavorably. You would want to try to link with sites that have higher page rankings than your site to boost your site’s page rank. Not always easy to do, but not impossible either.

Sometimes there are great free directories that you can list your website in as well to provide one way links. One major goal of link exchanges is to boost your search engine ranking.

There are some who have argued that these agreements actually take traffic away from your site by encouraging visitors to click a link before they buy anything from you. While this may be true in some cases, it is not the standard. On the other hand, the increased traffic from search engine rank improvement that you may gain by doing quality link exchanges, most likely will offset any possible loss of sales.

Many webmasters have found success with link exchanges and would not do without them. But, here again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be a benefit to your business or not, and it will be up to you as well to decide whether it’s working once you’ve gotten into it. Give it some time to evaluate, as results don’t come instantly.

About the Author:
By Shep Samson working to increase the science and art of web promotion and increasing page ranking in the organic search engine results.