Improving Your Sites Rankings with Link Exchanges

I figured I should start discussing SEO, by beginning with one of the key ingredients in determining the rankings of ANY web site - link building! Link building is easily the most important ingredient for a large number of reasons, but primarily because Google uses the number of incoming links to your website as a primary factor in their 'search engine placement algorithm'. In other words, a successful link building campaign is vital to achieving high placement in any of the top search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask. There are a few techniques that you can utilize to gain backlinks, incoming links to a website or web page, to your website; however, it is first important to understand what types of sites you want linking to your web page before implementing your link building campaign.

Now here is a list of 5 important factors that should be kept in mind with your link campaign:

1.) PageRank: When your attempting to filter out your websites make sure that your getting back links from pages with a high Google PageRank. Google PageRank, or PR, is a score that Google has used to attempt to determine the approximate importance of a webpage. PR's are on a scale from 0 - 10, with 0 being a page of least importance and 10 being an extremely important page. If you just launched your website, and managed to get a backlink from a PR7 site, you can almost be ensured that Google will find your page fairly quickly and it will began to be included in the SERP's (search engine result pages).

Key Point #1: Try to get links from high page rank websites. To find out a website's PR you can download the Google toolbar or you can visit: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php.


2.) Number of Links. The fewer outbound links the web page has the better; if you can find a high PR site with few outbound links you are in luck. This, however, also depends on the PR of the web page. For instance, while a PR1 web site with 100 outbound links will not be very valuable to your link building campaign, a PR7 page with 100 outbound links is very useful in obtaining better rankings.

Key Point #2: Keep in mind the page's ratio of links to PR. Focus on pages with high PR, but also keep in mind the number of outbound links.


3.) Focus on Related Sites. For instance, I own EclipseCarTuner.com (an auto parts site); I wouldn't exchange links with a hair salon website or anything not auto-related. The closer related the website is that links to you, the better off you will be. Ideally, you want to have sites link to you that have some of your keywords that your trying to rank for either in the title tag, or header tags, or at the very least have some context or text on the page in which your keywords exist.

Key Point#3: Complete link exchanges with related web sites for optimal results.


4.) Anchor Text. If the site's link page doesn't allow you to use anchor text the link will be nearly useless. Anchor text is the text that exists in the link; for instance, instead of just www.yoursite.com, you would ideally want to use your keywords: Blue Widgets (if you sold blue widgets). When you do this, your essentially telling Google a site has given you a 'vote' for that keyword and to rank it higher in their search engine.

Keep in mind that you will want to use keywords that people will actually search for. Otherwise, you will end up receive minimal traffic for optimizing the wrong keywords. To determine the number of times the keyword is searched use SEObook's keyword suggestion tool. To use this tool just type in a very basic keyword you are considering optimizing....I sell Eclipse auto parts on my site, so I typed in 'Mitsubishi Eclipse' and got a number of good suggestions. The results will list the number of searches performed per month for overture and the estimated number for Google and Yahoo.

Key Point #4: Get links from sites using high traffic keywords as anchor text.


5.) Be Wary of 'rel="nofollow"'. Fairly recently google and other search engines have begun to utilize the HTML tag rel="nofollow". This code causes the search engines to ignore the links on any web pages that contain it. Make sure to use the 'view selection source' function in IE or Firefox browser and check for this code before requesting a link exchange email to the webmaster.

Key Point #5: Avoid link exchanges with sites that utilize the rel="nofollow" code.


I'm sure I'm missing some other important considerations for link exchanges, however, this should give you a basic grasp of link exchanges. I will most likely be updating this post as I think of more ;) I've personally had a lot of success with link exchanges in marketing my website and if you put in the time and follow these guidelines with your website(s) you should too!