Posted on Friday, 19th December 2008 by Jeff
Unless you have lots of people offering to exchange links with you, you’ll probably have to find your link partners yourself. The best link partners you can have are ones that are optimizing their website for “almost exactly” the same keywords as you’re going for. If you linked out one-way to their website, Google wouldn’t penalize you because they’re considered “useful” and “relevant” sources.
The first thing you need to do is create a page to add all of your partner’s links on. You could link to this from your navigation as “Useful Links” or “Useful Sources”. After you have your links page created, search Google or Yahoo for websites that are optimized for the same keywords you’re going for. Add a link to their website on your link exchange page and write a “unique” description of their website under that. For example, if you wanted my website as a link exchange partner, you could link to me using this link and description:
SiteStartups.com - A Unique Blog For Webmaster Ideas Find useful tips and tricks for succeeding on the internet. The owner of this blog also has a great list of interesting internet ideas you may want to use.
After you’ve done this for a few potential link exchange partners, you should create a new email address for your potential partners to contact you by. Don’t use a mailbox that’s already filled because you may miss some emails. I would recommend you use something like linkpartners@yourdomain.com since it sounds professional.
Go down your list of potential link exchange partners and send them an email stating that you already added a link to their website and that you want to exchange links with them. If you added the link and description I gave you above for my website, you could send me an email that says something like this:
“Dear SiteStartups.com Webmaster,
After analyzing the targeted keywords and quality of your website content, I’ve come to the conclusion that you would make a perfect link exchange parter. I have already added a unique link and description to your website at http://www.mydomain.com/useful-links.html and would kindly like to ask you to do the same. Please email me at linkpartners@mydomain.com after you have added a “unique” link and description to my website. I think this is a great opportunity for both of us to improve our SEO, and would recommend you accept my invitation. If I don’t get a response within 3 days, I will presume that you are not interested in exchanging links and will remove your link from my website.”
If the webmaster decides to exchange links with you, make sure they add your link on a page that will be indexed by Google. Some webmasters will create a page that cannot be accessed from the homepage which makes that link useless. You should also lookout for other sleazy tactics such as linking to your website with the “nofollow” attribute. Make sure to keep track of all your link partners and check your backlinks at least once a month using a reciprocal link checker to see if any of your partners have taken off your website.
Posted in SEO | Comments (3)
December 20th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hey Thanks! I’m going to add this to my to-do list for this week.
Re: First paragraph,
Another great thing to do is to have a guest book where new visitors have a comment/blog style page to post a link to their site. I saw this on one of the top guru marketer sites and it looks pretty swell.
December 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am
Great, but it’s not easy, also time-consuming, thanks any way.
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:49 am
I don’t think all your SEO efforts should revolve around link exchanges. Just do 5 a day if you think it’s so “time-consuming”. If you can get 30 link exchange partners a month then I think you’re doing good. Especially if your website is brand new since Google might penalize you for building up your links too quickly.