How much time should you really spend on link exchanges?

Link exchanges are a very popular way to generate traffic. They are also very time consuming.

The basic way to exchange links is to find a website that is willing to exchange links with you and add them to your links, resources or whatever you have named the section. There are a lot more details to doing this right, such as having a limited number of links per page, themes, checking the other site’s robots.txt and code to ensure your link will be spidered, and so forth. Then there’s keeping track of whether or not the other website actually puts up your link and leaves it up.

Difficult though this may be, it remains one of the most popular ways to ensure that you get backlinks pointing toward your website.

Many people recommend sticking with themed links only, on the theory that search engines give relevant links more consideration when weighting the link. Others say they all count, and others say link exchanges are discounted in any case.

There are ways to make getting relevant link exchanges easier.

Go to SiteSell and join their link exchange program. It’s free and intended only for websites interested in relevant link exchanges.
You can also try websites such as Link Market, but if you only want relevant links you will have to sort through a lot of irrelevant offers. On the other hand, if you are less concerned with relevance, as many webmasters on such websites are, you can get a lot of links fairly quickly. Keep your eye out for sites that don’t allow their links to be spidered, are banned, etc., however.
Research relevant websites on your own and propose a link exchange. This is easiest if they have a link exchange program set up already, but you might be able to get a link even if they do not.

But link exchanges are not the only way to go.

A fairly new program is Digital Point’s Ad Co-Op. This is a very fast way to get links to your website, but you need to be able to process PHP, which most hosts currently allow, but may take some effort on your part if your page extensions do not end in .php. Essentially you will get about the number of links you put in. There is weighting consideration based on the number of pages you have listed in number of ads you show per page, Google and PageRank, but not on your number of visitors. This keeps your weighting fairly honest. You must display the ads on every page, however, and cheaters are quickly banned from the system.

The links you get from this program as of this writing will generally not be relevant, but if you have a good number of pages in Google, your backlinks and rankings may increase fairly quickly. As the links are generated randomly on each page this is not a guarantee, and small/new sites will take a while to see results, but in my personal experience this program is well worth the effort. Call it a quick way to get links, but don’t depend strictly on the Co-Op for your links.

The next backlink standby technique is to write and submit articles. Once again, this is time consuming, but it ensures that your link is relevant to your website, as it comes in an resource box you have written. It takes time to write articles, but you can submit them to article directories, and they may show backlinks there as well as on any websites that pick up the article. They also make great content on your website, and if you preauthorize people to publish the article on their websites it is easier for it to be picked up.

Getting backlinks is very important for most websites. Not only do most (possibly all, but these things can change) important search engines love backlinks, but they do generate visitors. Set aside time regularly to gain backlinks, whether through link exchanges or other strategies.

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How much time should you really spend on link exchanges?

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