Exchanging links can be a very powerful way of getting more traffic to your website if it
is done correctly. Just exchanging links with other sites willy-nilly can be a complete
waste of your time.

For example, I recently received an email from someone wanting to exchange links with
one of my web sites, that is rather established and has some page rank. They wanted
a link from my web site to one of theirs. In exchange, the were going to put a link to
my site from a completely different website with a bunch of unrelated links on it and no
page rank. Now this may not be totally horrible if this page got a lot of traffic, but it
would also have to get a lot of traffic from people who are very interested in the subject
matter of my web site. The chances of that are greatly reduced because of the
large number of websites with unrelated topics, so any one topic that would only have
a fraction of the number of visitors.

If you want link exchanges to give you better results, you will want to not be placed in a
link directory with hundreds of other links (unless you're in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory).
You want to be placed on your own page and have a link pointing back to your website
with your targeted keyword in the link text.

The easiest way to do this is to offer to write an article for a related web site and place a link back
to your site in the resource box of the article. Many web site owners will be willing to do this
as they will have fresh original content on their web site that they don't have to write the content themselves. You will get a link that isn't on a link directory, and they will get original content.
Not a bad deal for either side!

B. Hopkins
Internet Business Strategist