Link Exchange: Is This A Good Idea?

You know you’ve achieved a certain level of success with your website, or at least caught someone’s interest, when you open up your email to find a link trading offer from someone on another site. But is link exchange even a good idea, or is it just a waste of time?

Link Exchange
The idea of link exchange is simple enough. You have a website and someone else with a website contacts you and asks about exchanging links. What does that mean? Basically, you put a link to their site on one of your pages, and they return the favor by doing the exact same thing for you. Many times, people who offer link exchange deals will give you very specific links to use and even give you a separate link so you can see where your Web address will appear on their page.

All in all, it’s a pretty fair deal. You do something for them, they do something for you, everyone has what they want. But…what’s the point? It does take a little bit of time and effort to create links, after all, so what’s the appeal of trading with other sites when it really just creates more website work?

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Two words: free advertising. That phrase alone should get any website owner’s blood pumping. The more traffic you can drive to your site, the better. It stands to reason that if you have a whole lot of links out there that point people to your site, you’ll reap rewards in the form of page hits. That’s the idea behind link trading, and the goal of engaging in such agreements.

Why do it? For one, link trading is incredibly easy to implement. The website you’re working with will give you the exact link they want you to use, and in most cases won’t put any restrictions on where you’re going to put that link in relation to your own site. They’ll put one of your links on their pages, and then all their visitors will have the chance to explore your pages as well. Anything that could potentially boost Web traffic is a truly precious thing, and all you have to do is cut and paste simple code.

Through link trading, you’ll be putting many more links on your own site. Search engines like links and often give higher rankings to sites that have a lot of them. Simply having a lot of links on your own site can, however slightly, give you better search rankings — which, again, means more traffic.

Is this a good idea?
Link exchange sounds great! Why doesn’t everyone do it? Link exchange is often quick and easy to do, and offers the compelling possibility of increasing your own site’s traffic through advertising and search engine rankings. But it’s not all sunshine and roses when it comes to playing the link exchanging game.

Whenever  they put your link on their site, now you have to put theirs on yours. Wherever you plan to bury this link on your pages, you will still be offering traffic an easy way to leave your site. Leaving your site is exactly what you don’t want your visitors to do. Each link you provide to someone else’s site is actually helping them increase their own traffic and revenue — it doesn’t do a thing for your site when traffic leaves your own pages.

Just a little tip

• Link Exchange is a bad idea unless the site linking to you has relevance.
• It would be even better to purchase advertising space from other sites in your niche that has high page rank and traffic.
• When you buy advertising space, you get traffic to your site without sending traffic away from your site

Discussion
Do you use link exchange or link exchange programs? And has this technique boost your site’s traffic? Or are you thinking about trying this link exchange with other sites?

Leave your comments below and let’s see what you think about this.