Quality Link Building With Link Exchanges Done Right
You have heard a lot of things about link building and ranking higher in search engine sites, but what exactly is link building? Link building is said to be the process which helps increasing your website’s link popularity by exposing your links to search engines through various channels like link exchanges, newsletters, directory submissions, article submissions to directories and niche blogs, press release submissions, forum posting and blog commenting etc. This means that if you would like to have your pages appear in search engine results, you should apply link building techniques.
In this post, I’ll talk about 2 popular link building methods: 1) reciprocal link exchange and 2) three (or n)-way link exchange. You’ll learn what they are, how they used to work before and what you have to do to make them work for you effectively.
1. Reciprocal Link Exchange
One of the most popular link building methods is to exchange links with other websites, preferably related to your business niche. Link exchanges generally are very cost-effective (usually free) and you are getting targeted traffic from relevant sites as well. However, effective link exchanging has changed a lot over the years. While several years ago, it was enough for high search engine rankings just to drop your link on link exchange pages crowded with links to other, unrelated sites, it is not sufficient anymore. If you are going for link exchanges, you need to find pages that are related to your content and request an exchange with a similar related page on your website (it may be your index page or any internal page on your website). Links build this way between individual pages are still highly effective in search engines but obviously also much more difficult to get because there is usually more manual work required on both sides.
2. Three (or n)-way Related Link Exchange
Once traditional links on crowded link exchange pages became less effective, webmasters started to offer 3-way link exchanges which include three websites that link to each other in an A-B-C-A format (Site A links to Site B, Site B to Site C and Site C links to Site A). Again, also in this scenario, it depends on the environment in which your link is placed. If your link is placed on a page that is not related to your website with no information or content except dozens of outgoing links, then this format is as uneffective as the traditional, reciprocal link exchange from link exchange pages. Ideally, the page where your link will be placed should have as less outbound links as possible and your link should be embeded within as much relevant content as possible to the page you intend to link to.
