Customers may sometimes be contacted by other websites about putting a link to their site up in exchange for a link on their site. This is called a “link exchange”, and they are definetley useful for generating more traffic to your site.
Link exchanges are great because they generate additional traffic to your site in multiple ways. The obvious way is by people on the other site clicking on the link to go to your site. This direct effect is nice but not the main reason people are interested in link exchanges.
Link exchanges also help your search engine results. Google and other search engine “crawlers” see a link on a site and then follow it the link destination. By having links on other sites, it will increase the number of crawls you get to your site. There are some important factors to both be cautious of and to look for when deciding whether to link exchange with a site.
- Traffic of the Partnering Site – This can be researched through Alexa Ratings. Higher traffic sites will help you more.
- Relative Content of the Partnering Site – Do you have a law site and the partnering site is about basketball? That link wouldn’t be smart. Partner up with sites that have similar content but are not direct competitors.
- Dofollow Links – The link must be allowed to be followed by search engines. This means the link should not have the parameter “rel=’nofollow'” in it. Here is a blog post about html links that explains the ‘nofollow’ parameter.
- Link Text – If the partner is willing to put nice keywords in their link, then this should help SEO. That is, instead of “GPM Web Solutions” saying something more keyword rich like “Affordable Website Designs”. Search engines take note on the words in the link and what they should indicate for search results.
Important Factors for Link Exchanges
Always make sure to give careful thinking to who you decide to partner up with for link exchanges. They can be very useful, but one link can be more effective than 200 links. It is the quality of the link that matters.
