Link exchanges have been part of the SEO toolkit for some time now.
In general, link exchanges don’t work they way most people do them. Search engines aren’t crazy about reciprocal site wide links, so putting another blog on your blogroll in exchange for them putting you on their blogroll isn’t going to do either of you very much good, SEO-wise.
The right way to do link exchanges is to find another site in your niche that you would like to have linking to you. Find a single post on that site that has some text you want as anchor text for a link to your site, and then convince the owner to make that text a link to your site. You can offer a link on a relevant post of yours.
Done this way, the link exchange looks natural to search engines, and you both get a boost in search engine results positioning.
How do you find these sites with owners who are willing to exchange links? Contact every suitable site in your niche, and ask. Yeah, that’s a lot of work, which is why most people don’t do it.
Well, while going through all the Site Build It! tools for my series of SBI! review posts, I came across a link exchange marketplace they offer, called the Site Sell Value Exchange.
You register your site with the exchange, and specify the niche for the site by entering the most common keywords you’re targeting, and a description of the site. The exchange then gives you a list of other sites that cover similar topics, and you can contact the site owners and offer to exchange relevant in-post links.
The exchange takes the hard work out of doing link exchanges right, by providing you with a list of sites whose owners are already willing to exchange links and who want you to contact them about it.
I know my SBI! posts lately have started to sound like I’m a big fan, but I am quickly becoming one. The more I see of the SBI! tools, the more it seems like they have everything put together extremely well. The exchange is just one of the publicly available examples.
Click here for more info on the Site Sell Value Exchange.
“Find a single post on that site that has some text you want as anchor text for a link to your site, and then convince the owner to make that text a link to your site. ”
CommentKahuna is an excellent free software for this as well. I have used SBI and their value exchange program in the past and found it helpful too!
Great post. This is the first time to your site. It’s definitely in my RSS reader now.
[quote post=”429″]CommentKahuna is an excellent free software for this as well.[/quote]
CommentKahuna is a great tool for finding relevant blog to comment on, but basically it simply facilitates blog commenting. This is very different from SBI!’s Value Exchange. In the Value Exchange, you get in page links put there by the blog owner, not a blog comment that may or may not be approved or may be blocked by a spam checker.
So both are a great way of promoting your blog.
[quote post=”429″]Great post. This is the first time to your site. It’s definitely in my RSS reader now.[/quote]
Hi Chris, glad to have you here!
Good information here. The one thing I’ve been experimenting is the whole Trackback and linking to useful content. That seems to work really well for getting a lot of quality links back from sites.
Reciprocal links are not as effective as they once was, trackbacking and linking to relevant content works.I agree with ScottUA.
[quote post=”429″]The one thing I’ve been experimenting is the whole Trackback and linking to useful content.[/quote]
Absolutely, linking out to genuinely useful content is a great technique.
[quote post=”429″]Reciprocal links are not as effective as they once was[/quote]
Hi Tom, the traditional view of a reciprocal link is a sitewide reciprocal, which is clearly artificial (e.g. you put me on your blogroll, I’ll do the same for you).
What Value Exchange does is facilitate natural looking reciprocal links, the sort that are likely to happen as you go about your normal business of linking out to quality sites in your niche (which also link to you, because you’ve provided something of quality in the niche). Both links are deep links to individual posts, from within individual posts.
I don’t have any hard data on whether Google makes a distinction between the two sorts of reciprocal links, but it fits their philosophy to do so.