Pros and Cons of Link Exchanges
Link exchanges can be a viable way to promote your online business. Whether you are just starting out with your first website, or an experienced webmaster, if you haven’t tried link exchanges, you may want to consider it. Exchanges are a combination between traffic exchanges and affiliate marketing programs.
For starters a link exchange offers you the opportunity to share your links with other sites, and in exchange you place their links on your site. There are some new opportunities that allow you to do this through an exchange site, but most of the time you will have to contact target sites directly and make a request to the site’s webmaster that an exchange be entered into between your site and theirs. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Try both and see which fits your needs 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.
There’s a few things to consider before going into link exchanges. Most of the time there is start up work involved to set up the process, from contacting webmasters that you’d like to exchange links with, to being able to monitor the effectiveness of those exchanges. There are many valuable tools out there available to help with this process. It’s important that you find exchanges that are quality and not just wasting both time and space. Getting link exchanges can be effective, but you need to make it count.
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.
There are directories out there that can be great to list your website with to gain one way links to your site. There are both free and paid sites, some have great page ranks, some do not, so do some research. The main thing you’re looking for, is getting those links to your site to improve your organic website’s traffic.
There are some who say that these exchanges 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, it is not the standard. On the other side of the issue, the increased traffic from improved search engine rank that you may gain by doing quality link exchanges, most likely will offset any possible losses. You will also gain some visitors to your site that you wouldn’t have gained otherwise, so most of the time it all evens out.
Many web owners have found great success with link exchanges and would not do without them. Again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be advantageous to your business or not, and if it will be worth it once you’ve got it up and running. Give it a few months however to test the results because they do not come overnight.
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