Rui Zamith

One of the terms that you’re gonna hear when you start to get into the web community, is the “link exchanging” process. As the name basically explains by itself, link exchange consists on the strategy of getting partnerships with other websites, in a way that both can be promoting its partner.

At this moment, you’re thinking.. “well, it sounds interesting, I will be promoting my website, for free, and in exchange I’ll just have to offer the other guy a tiny space on my website. It is in fact cool to have some “sponsors” on my website!”. All of those facts are absolutely true, however, by link exchanging you will be doing far more than that! What most people that work in the web know as a fact (or should know at least) is that search engines love inbound links (links on external pages that are linking back to your website). In fact, they love them so much that inbound links have a big share of whats needed to improve your site’s ranking. If you look at the Alexa ranking of a powerful chain of websites, for instance in the travel industry, you’ll find out that their web ranking is massively improved not only for the tons of content and traffic that they may have, but also because of all the linking between all the website “branches”.

Going into a bit of detail, how can we measure the quality and consistency of a link exchange? Well, there are several things to have in mind:

• First of all, will you be exchanging a banner or a text link? A banner can obviously be a prettier solution, but having a text link can be as good or even better than the banner, for the simple fact that for the crawlers this is all about keywords!
• If you have a bad quality banner, don’t know how to design and have no other chance but to use an ugly image, go for the text link. Make sure that your main keywords are on the link title, and you have done a good job.
• Link exchange is most of the times a good practice, however, it is specially great if you are exchanging links with a website within your market, niche, or geographical location. Imagine that you have a travel website, organized by cities. If you’re exchanging links with a website in a similar position, make sure that you have several targeted links, per city page (e.g. “Travel Guides London” on the London page, and “Travel Guides Manchester” on the Manchester’s specific page).
• If you already have a powerful brand to promote, make sure that you analyse the quality of your partner. If the guy is only starting with his business, perhaps a free link exchange is not the way to go, as his website will be far better pushed, with your higher visits, pageviews and web rank.
• So what can we consider a good link exchange? Using my own website as an example, I would include the main keywords, and probably my own brand to make it consistent – “Rui F Zamith – web marketing and design”. Google will be automatically associating these keywords with the url www.rfzamith.com – the “Rui F Zamith” is technically not important, as I’m not gonna be fighting with other websites for that keyword, but it will make the title look more apealing.

These are, on my point of view, the essential “things-to-know” about link exchange. Make sure you have them in mind while managing your web relations, and feel free to leave your comments!