How to Run an Effective Link Exchange Campaign

Link exchange (exchanging links between sites to achieve higher position in the search results) is a good old proven SEO methods. Though it's not exactly as powerful as it used to be back in the early days of search engine optimization, it's still a very efficient technique to build authority of a web site and better its position in the search engine listings. Let's go through the exact steps that create a hard-hitting link exchange campaign.

Link exchange (just like any linking tactics in that respect) is grounded on two components: quality and relevancy. You need to make sure that the web sites you exchange links with are trusted and established sources on the web and are in the same niche as your website or are complementary in some way. That brings us to the first stage of linking campaign.

Keyword Research

To find relevant web sites you need to find the key phrases these sites can be characterised by. Take your general list of keywords that you target in your search engine optimization campaign and broaden it with key phrases from relevant markets. For example if your web site is about bass guitars, you can also seed in keywords that describe effect pedals, amps, musical theory, picks, recording equipment, etc. Once you've come up with a list of keywords you can move on to the next stage of link exchange.

Searching For Link Partners

Quiring Google and other search engines is the mostself-evident and a very effective way to hunt for relevant link partners. Search for the key phrases from your list and you're sure to get loads of relevant results. Don't try to focus on the 1st page of search results. In fact you would be better off starting with the second or third page, because web sites that are already at the top are less likely to be interested in link exchange.

Select The Best Link Sources

Once you have a list of relevant sites it's time to run the quality control. Although any relevant inlink is good for your website's rankings, links are not equally weighted. Search engines incline to have more trust in .gov and .edu websites, thus textual incoming links from these types of domains are more effective. Don't think too much of PR thoughbearing in mind that it's just 1 of the factors in the ranking algo. It's not a bad idea to check the linking profile of a site, i.e. the websites it links to and those with links to it. Exchange links only with sites that are in a 'good neighborhood' and are not associated with questionable sites.

Generate Outbound Links To Partners

Before you begin mailing link exchange requests to admins of the sites from your list it's recommended to make the first step and link to them from your site. Generate a resource page with links to your potential link partners and mention it with the URL adress, anchor text and other parameters when requiring a link back.

Email Link Barter Invites

Link barter requests are the type of email every webmaster receives daily. A lot of them are automatically generated by link exchange bots, therefore if you wish to increase your chances to win a link try to sound as personal and specific as you can. Address each person by their name, mention their web site and sure sound polite.

Maintain Your Link exchange Campaign

Getting a backlink to your web site is not yet the end of the link exchange process. It's rather the start of a new stage. Now you need to secure that the link remains in place with the right anchor parameters. When you have hundreds of links it's not possible to monitor them all by hand. The easiest way to manage your links is by using some SEOtools. This way you can save a lot of time and checking your links prompter and with higher accuracy. Such tools are also extremely useful on all other stages of link exchange: when finding partner websites, assessing the link value, mailing out link requests and so forth.

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