Link Exchange is a method to increase the website traffic by exchanging links between two or more websites. It is commonly known as “reciprocal links”. It is more beneficial only if the link is from a higher ranked website. Usually the exchange is done by including a simple HTML code of a third party website to your website. Links are included as banner images with hyperlinks that have attractive images to attract the visitors. Also there are websites that offer link exchange on a payment basis, with a group of websites in their control for specific keywords. Even though this method was considered a very important off site optimization technique in the early days of SEO, but it is not given more importance now as it is a time consuming process. Other reason of reluctance in link exchange is the fear of getting a spam link in return.
Where to get the links from?
The first and foremost thing before planning to have a link exchange is to find the right websites. A good method for this would be to first search the keywords that are relevant to your website. Next step would be to find out the sites that offer reciprocal links, probably with a better ranking that have content related to your keyword.
Its simple, check the inbound and outbound links of the website you are getting link from.
This will ensure that the link is a got from a website with good neighbourhood. Apart from all these, the most important factor of link exchange is the “relevancy” of the link which search engines take into consideration. As far as relevancy is concerned its better to get page wise link rather than a site wise link. In a Page wise link the probability of getting your major keywords in page is more rather than a website wise link. Reciprocal Links from a good website or rather a quality website can surely boost your websites Page rank. On the other hand a spam link can turn the alarm on search engines like google and can penalize your websites page rank on a long run.
Getting over excited to get more reciprocal links may have negative impact on your website, as search engines doubt more back links within a short period of time. So the thumb rule for using link exchange would be to include relevant and quality links at the right time intervals.
