Why exchange links?

The world wide web is like the universe...

The number of web sites on the internet is growing and growing, representing a universe where each new site is like a yet undiscovered star. Most space travellers (speak, internet surfers) visit only the brightest, most visible stars. Analogously, a good link exchange strategy can make your site become a bright star in its own right.

Two main reasons why you need links!

Most of the web rather resembles black holes that cannot be seen and from where there is no escape, because they do not have links - neither incoming links nor outgoing links. Incoming links have two functions. Firstly, links produce traffic. If your link is shown on thematically related sites, there is a good chance that visitors to these sites will find your link interesting and want to visit your site too. Secondly, each incoming link is a vote for your site. After all, the other webmaster has reviewed your site and found that it is of sufficient quality to be listed on his site. This vote forms the basis for some search engines that base their ranking of sites in their results on exactly these votes. The number and quality of these votes represent what is referred to as "Link Popularity".

Reciprocal links are quality confirmations

Why exchange links then? Because what goes around, comes around. You provide traffic to your link partners, they provide traffic for you. By engaging in a reciprocal link exchange, you effectively vote for their site, and they vote for your site. Thus, as reciprocal link exchanges of thematically related sites are subjected to human peer review, link popularity is a valuable metric for search engines to make it an important factor in their ranking calculation.

Why "link farms" are bad for you

It should be noted that "link farms" exist for the sole purpose of artificially inflating link popularity. These link farms work in an automated way, without the aspect of human quality review of the submitted link. Stay away from these link farms. The value of links from these sites is very limited, and search engines, once alerted to their presence, will penalize the offending "link farm" site and the sites that were involved with them.

The good old manual link exchange is still the best way...

The only true way for a good link exchange campaign is to secure quality links by exchanging links with thematically matching sites, where the links are actually to the benefit of the visitor. This will require human review of all links and is usually achieved by emailing the webmaster of the other site about your link exchange proposal. [Read here how to get reciprocal links]

This part of a link exchange campaign cannot be omitted, as it forms the basis for making link popularity a meaningful metric. However, modern software solutions are being devised to aid and assist as much as possible in this task. Add-Link-Exchange (ALE) is a product designed for this process. ALE makes it easy to add a sophisticated link exchange facility to your site. In fact, we're proud to say that Add-Link-Exchange does it's job extra-ordinarily well. Try ALE out for free, today!