Link building has been a huge requirement in search engine optimisation ever since the likes of Google & Yahoo entered the scene back in the 90′s and it’s the bread and butter of how the engines rank websites day after day. However many beginners to SEO are using link exchanges with very little knowledge of how the engines see these – in short badly!

What are Link Exchanges
Link exchanges is basically an agreement between two websites to link to each other – but that’s what the engines want right? People linking to content they find relevant and useful. Actually no – when you and another site decide to link up (aka: reciprocal linking) you are actually going against what the search engines want. Which is natural one way linking.

Okay. What should I do instead?
Rather than using link exchanges you can do a number of things:

Create great content with linkers in mind.

Creating great content for the linkers and visitors which is helpful – maybe a tool to calculate how many light bulbs you need for your house if you were running a lighting website – in order to receive natural one way links. Not only does this help you to attract links & help your visitors, it also adds fresh content to your website.

Be active in your community

Without a doubt somebody else will be running a blog or website relating in some way to your own field. Following on from the idea of a lighting website, a electricians forum may exist which you can actively contribute to helping to answer questions and provide your valuable insight – after all you live and breathe your industry so it makes sense to impart some of your own knowledge onto others.

The same idea applies for blogs, you can create helpful articles for other websites to publish in return for links and exposure. You may not see direct benefits in terms of people coming onto your website but the link is there and will help your website to rank. Try and push yourself to write an article once a week.

Commenting on other blogs
This concept really follows on from being active in your community but I think it deserves it’s own heading. Many blogs offer you the chance to comment on their articles and by doing so you can leave your name and a link back to your own website.

(Note: mostly these sites use the attribute nofollow on their links which tells the engines not to pass any link value/juice across however in practice this is not always the case and these links can still count to some degree).

Helpful comments show you know what you’re on about and can help to drive traffic to your site. Even if it’s just a few comments a day then begin to add up over time and can make a real difference.

To Sum Up – Don’t Exchange, Just Build
I hope that you will stop exchanging links with other websites and start to build great linkable content (articles, tools, downloads, etc) and play a more active role in your industry online.

I’d love to know what sort of stuff you guys have done in order to link build or attract links and even your experiences with link exchanges whether good or bad.

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