Does link exchange really get you more visitors?

Yes it does, when you do it the proper way…

First and foremost you don’t automate it with a software program like SEOelite. Why not? Because the email they send out to ask for a link exchange is way too general for you to feel at ease with.

Is there a win-win

Always ask yourself: does the other website have any benefit of linking back to you? Benefits are mostly in the following :

• both sites are about the same topic: an search engine optimization site will link with another seo site
• both sites compliment each other: SEO software sites are happy to hook up with general SEO sites
• both sites have a similar parent subject: Internet Marketing and SEO both have as a parent "increase on line traffic"

If none of the above fits, then you most likely wont get a link exchange. I mean: why would a dog site link to a site about librarians? Although you could say: in a library are also books about dogs
or what…

All looks ok, yet no link exchange

Again there are a vast amount of reasons people don’t want to link to you, even if you have all the above win-win right. Just like in the real world: people only frequent a certain amount of other people.

Maybe one of the following causes should be considered:

• your site is new (has little visitors), the other site is established (has a lot or "enough" visitors)
• the webmaster is busy with other things, your email gets lost in his mailbox
• the webmaster doesn’t see the advantage of linking to you! If you are convinced there is a win-win, you should point that out to the webmaster of the other site.
• the webmaster doesn’t believe in link exchange, he uses other strategies to get online traffic.

So you need to find people that are interested to add your link on their site. That’s where good oldfashion add URL directories come in, as well as the newer entrecard dot com or projectwonderful dot com.

There is more than link exchange

Actually, link exchange is only one of the many ways to get more traffic to your site. It’s only useful if your link is on a site with little other links and your link should be on topic of the page it is on. That’s simply put why Contextual advertising is such a great success…

But search engines love links you say… that’s true. An easy way to get links to your site is getting links to your good content. And again, here you can help others to stumble upon your site, do you digg that? Yes, we are talking reddit, digg, delicious, newsvine, stumble…