Do Not Give up On Link Exchanges!

While many of the major search engines have lessen the importance of external links to websites, you should not stop proposing link exchanges with quality websites that are related in theme to your website. Remember that the related resource section of your website should include web domains that can help your online visitors to find additional information about niche subjects that may not be available at your website. However, you do not want your resource pages to contain too many external links; otherwise, Google and other search engines may consider that this page is being used for manipulating the search rankings.

You should think of link exchanges as commercials that can be seen, while you watch your favorite TV show. When your online visitors need a break from a TV show, the station shows commercials to pay for the programming and allow advertisers to promote their products and services to its audience of viewers. Unlike a television station, as a webmaster, you will probably not charge the other webmasters for exchanging links. If you do decide to charge a fee for the link, you will need to add a “no, follow” command. Without this command or a similar one, you could be penalized for accepting paid links that do not comply with Google and other search engine guidelines for webmasters. In a sense, this allows for webmasters with little or no marketing budget to compete with larger websites for positioning within a search engine. If not, a large website could buy hundreds of thousands of links and you would have little opportunity to rank highly on certain keywords because of this search engine manipulation.

Since your website should be meant for a specific target audience, you probably do not want to write about every subject. Otherwise, your online visitors may not understand the concept of your website and not come back. If your website focuses on politics, then there should not be poems about Greek Mythology on your web domain. Therefore, it is important to stay focused. Let other related websites appear in your resource section that focus on areas that do not fit within your target market. By doing so, your online visitors will see that you have researched other areas of interest that are related to your website. It is a good way to add value to their search experience, but put a disclaimer stating that you are not responsible for any warranties that they make.

Link exchanges are a good way for webmasters to trade traffic with websites that are related in theme. Because of this, no one website should attempt to market to every online visitor. So, stay true to your target markets. Exchange links with other websites, in order to offer your online visitors additional resources in areas that are closely related to your website. You should not put more than 50 resources (external links) per page, unless you want it to be hard for your online visitors to find a certain subject.