Link exchanges are sites that help webmasters find link partners for the benefit of traffic. Link exchanges such as www.linkexchangeit.com or linkmarket.net are one of those that help you get link partners for traffic. They are used by some to get more link popularity to increase their ranking in the search engines like Yahoo! or Google, which both use to calculate web pages ranking in the search engine results.

Over the years link exchanges have been criticized by both webmasters and search engines, even have been targeted by search engines. They have been called link farms and link scams. The truth is that they are not link farms, link farms are network of sites that link to each other for the benefit of a higher ranking on the search engines. Most link exchanges are not so called link scams. How can you tell the difference between non-link scams and link scams? There are a few things that you should look at closely at link exchanges.

1) Do you have to upload a web page or file to your site?

2) Are they in the search engines?

3) Are most member’s sites spamming?

4) Does the link exchange look professional?

If any of these are true about the link exchange you should not join and leave fast as you came. It is important to look at this very careful because you are investing in your site and this could crush your site’s future.

Link exchanges have proved to be successful both for getting you a good ranking and getting more traffic to your web site. Link exchanges are one of the most powerful tools you can have by your companies side, but like all things they have a down side because they can be abused and used the wrong way, so be careful!

Naturally, some web marketers (probably the ones that think exit pop-ups are useful) think that by signing guestbooks and adding links by the hundreds they will improve their link popularity scores at search engines. Before you get excited and do a Google search on the phrase “sign our guestbook” (1.9 million BTW) and head off like a link monkey, here’s my take on the whether guestbook links are valid, ignored, or penalized, and if they have any impact on the success of a web site’s link popularity.

Guestbook links are really no different than FFA links, if you think about it. FFA (Free For All) pages are pages where a link can be obtained by anyone (even a script) without human intervention, meaning no person even looks to see if the requesting site has any decent content. Such link lists are obviously useless. Ask yourself when was the last time you went to a FFA link list to find a useful web site. How about never?

And since ANY site owner could do the same thing–sign a thousand guestbooks–how much credibility can such links truly have? None. If I run a site that sells snake oil I can spend my days signing the guestbooks of the best sites on the web and leech some link popularity from them? Nope.

The real question here is do search engines know about this scam yet, or do they count guestbook links as additional links for poplarity rankings? My hunch is that since guestbook links are not in any way an indication of content quality, then they do not matter at all.

If ANY search engine currently gives any credit or rankings impact for guestbook links, this impact is only because the engine hasn’t yet figured out the guestbook trick, and soon will. In fact, since the majority of guestbooks pages have the word guestbook in the URL string, it would be absurdly easy for the search engines to simply ignore any link that appears at any URL with the letters guestbook in it.

And I’ll bet you if they don’t already ignore them they will soon.

My last point is more philosophical. If the reason you are seeking a link is because

a). The link can be obtained automatically or in bulk numbers and b). You are trying to inflate links for SEO purposes, then the bottom line is it’s all bullsh*t, and no matter if the engines figure it out today or next month, the tactic is based on a lie and shouldn’t be done.

Until next time, I remain,

Eric Ward, EricWard.com – The Link Mensch

One of the key things to remember when developing your web-site presence is to always evaluate your competition. See what’s working for them; how they market their products and services, and even evaluate their KEYWORD and DISCRIPTION tags.

The key points of using these two Meta Tags, is optimization!

Evaluate your Keywords: look at your web-site and evaluate it services and products, be sure to do a search in www.Google.com to help you pick the keywords that your potential clients may be looking for.

The next thing is to evaluate your site content to see just how often you’re using these keywords, the biggest mistake that web-masters make is creating their Meta Tag Description and Keywords and not including them in their content pages.

To get the best results, is to ensure that you use as many of your keywords and discretion tags throughout your entire site.

The next thing is your products or images, be sure to include some of those keywords in your

Google, Yahoo, and Msn all use the following tags:

Be sure to include these in your Meta Tag, as it tells spider bots to search links to other pages on your site, increasing your chance of getting better indexed in the search engines.

The next key point is to also ensure you have created page titles for each section of your site, this is another mistake most make and they usually brand each page with their site name, the mistake is that, when your potential client types in to Google for a specific item or product you lesson your chances on being pulled up.

Name each section of your site using the Keywords you developed for your web-site, this ensuring higher page ranking in Google, and you not being found within the first returned results but ending up on page 15 etc.

Google looks also for inbound links, these being partner web-sites that have agreed to become a link partner or affiliate of your site.

Also update your content regularly, Google loves content, content, content, the more rich content you provide using your keywords the better you page rankings will be. The best method we found is to update your pages 2 to 3 times a week, for example Monday, Wednesday and again Sunday.

Thus ensuring the Google spider-bot will return regularly as so will your potential clients, as visitors are most likely to visit a web-site that is updated with new and interesting topics or items.

Now use Google, and do a search for your competition, within the first page results returned looked for potential link partners, which offer the same resources or products as you.

Contact the administrator or web-master simply asking them to link exchange with you. Most sites already offer a link exchange program or an affiliate program. These are perfect ways to create inbound links to your site that have already established Google page rank.

List your site in Link Directories that offer a specific category for your services, these are also excellent ways to create inbound links as the more inbound links you have generated to your web-site the higher the page rank in Google.

The key points to getting your site noticed is to optimize the keywords and use them threw out your site. Get quality link partners that have the same services or products you offer. The reason for this is if you link to a Tupper ware site and you offer fine wine, it isn’t going to do you much good as there is no common denominator. List your sites in Link Directories that offer a specific category that best fits your site content and services.