At this moment, you’re thinking “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”. All of those facts are absolutely true, however, by exchanging links 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”, blog and news articles.

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 use an image, make sure to fill the ‘alt’ tag.
• 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 geo 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.

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!

SEO (search engine optimization) is what allows your website to be well ranked on the web. A well structured website is essential if you want to reach a strong slice of your potential visitors – the ones finding you through the search engines. How does it work? Basically, Google, Yahoo, Bing, have what professionals call “the crawlers”, which are bots that run through your website and try to “understand it”. The way these bots read your blog is 100% dependent on the way you build it – and this is where the word “keyword” steps into this article. If your main keywords are showing up on the website’s main spots, crawlers will get the idea and improve your ranking for those keywords – on the titles, on the links, hidden behind an image, etc, any opportunity to enlighten your main keywords will be precious.

This is called “in-line SEO”, as you’re dealing with your own website and own content. You then also have the “out-line SEO”, with comprises the things that you can do out there in the web that will improve your website’s ranking (for example link building).

WordPress started as a blog platform, but is today used as a bit of everything. It can certainly work as a powerful and excellent CMS, for you to even manage a business out of it. To make it look the way you want, you’ll always need some coding skills, however the use of wordpress plugins can be extremely useful – you’ll find all sorts of tools, and most importantly, they are all totally free (have a quick look at wp’s plugin directory).

On this post, I will be making you a few suggestions that will hopefully help you start your wordpress experience with the right foot. It will be a mixture of best practices and wordpress plugins that you should download and implement on your new toy. So here you go:

• Page titles: homepage, article and archive titles should be careful managed. They will be the 1st element to be analyzed by the search engines. Have in mind that the first words are the most important ones, and they should include the keywords of current page’s content.
• Breadcrumbs: breadcrumbs is a technique used in web navigation, so that users can keep track of where exactly they are on a given website. If your template doesn’t have it, find a plugin that you can use.
• SEO Friendly Images plugin: this plugin will automatically edit the “alt” tag of your images (the equivalent to a text title to the crawlers) to the title of the article where they are located.
• Google XML Sitemaps plugin: an important tool that will create and update the XML of your website. The XML file will work same way as a feed, but is made for search engines. Explore Google Webmaster Tools and let Google know about your sitemap. Bing and Yahoo have similar platforms.
• WordPress Database Backup plugin: this one, together with some other plugins, are essential security plugins to adopt. Most of them can work automatically, upon proper set-up.
• cforms plugin: this amazing tool, developed in ajax, will allow you to create top-notch forms for your website – from the simple “contact form”, to a complex survey.

I do hope that you can take advantage of some of these suggestions, and get on the right trail with this terrific web platform. In the meantime, I can only suggest loads of reading and researching!