Exchanging Links
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Another great thing you can do to help you website start getting traffic is to exchange links with websites that are similar to yours, but are not direct competitors. For instance, if you were selling coffee filters, you may exchange links with other websites related to coffee, but not other websites that were specifically selling coffee filters.
There are two reasons for exchanging links with other websites. The first reason is that you can get traffic directly through the link that they put on their website.
The second reason is a big one. Getting listed in the search engines is becoming quite difficult with the enormous number of websites that they have to index each day. Search engines are set up to “crawl” websites, which means that they have what they call spiders that go through the text of websites and figure out what the sites are about. These spiders also follow links on websites to discover new sites on the internet so they can grow the database of searchable sites. Often times if you just submit your website directly to a search engine it will take longer to get indexed than if the search engine finds a link to your site while it is crawling another site.
Additionally, the more relevant links you have to your website from other sites, the more important and valuable a search engine will think your site is. Because search engines want to deliver high quality content to people searching through them, they list websites that they believe to have greater value higher up in the search results. This means it is to your benefit to make your website seem as valuable as possible to the search engines so more people can find your site without you having to pay for advertising. Getting high quality links to your site is a great way to do this.
To find sites to exchange links with, search for websites that are similar to your own, but not directly competing. When you find a site that looks good to you, email the website owner and ask if they would be interested in exchanging links with your site.
As a gesture of good faith it is a good idea to already have added their link to your website before you email them to ask if they will add yours to their site. You can create a separate page on your site to list related links so that you don’t have to put them on your homepage. You should be sure that your links page can be accessed from your homepage, though, so that your link exchange partners will feel they are getting good value by exchanging links with you.
Once you have added their link to your site, send an email to the website owner telling them that you are interested in exchanging links, that you have already added their link to your site (include a link to your “links” page to show them where their link has been added) and ask them to add your link to their page. Be sure to include the title of your website, a description of your site, your website address and your email address.
Not everyone you contact will add your link, but some will. If someone already has a “links” page on their website it is likely that they are open to exchanging links with other sites.