If you already have a website setup for your business you probably get a lot of requests from people to exchange links with their site. Chances are, the more reputable/established your website is, the more requests you receive.
A lot of business owners are not sure what to do with those reciprocal link exchange requests, so I get a lot of questions like this:
- What is a link exchange?
- Should I decline link exchange requests?
- Or is exchanging links better than nothing?
These are all excellent questions! Below I will try to answer them.
Definition of Reciprocal Link Exchange
Reciprocal link exchange is when you place a link to the other website on your site, and in exchange, a link to your website will be featured on their web page.
Benefits of Link Exchange
Why should you consider exchanging links? Let’s take a look at the benefits of link exchange.There are three main benefits to link exchange:
- Increased number of links pointing to your site. Improving your website link popularity will help you achieve better search engine positioning and increase your website traffic. It’s important to note that you should focus on quality not quantity of links. Not all links provide value and some might get your site penalized.
- Increased referral traffic. If a link to your website is placed on a highly – visited site, it can increase your visitor traffic.
- Increased user satisfaction. By exchanging links with the websites that your users can might find interesting, you are adding value.
To Exchange or Not to Exchange
If done properly, link exchange is a very effective and inexpensive way of increasing website’s popularity. Below are important questions to consider when deciding whether to exchange links on not:
- Is the site’s content/purpose complementary to your site/industry? Will your users find this site helpful/interesting?
- What page will your link appear on? Will it be placed on the home page or interior page 20 clicks away?
- What is the Rage Rank of the page where your link will be placed? Home page and interior pages often have different PR. The higher the PR of the page where you link will be place the higher the quality of the link.
- Where on the page will your site be placed? Will it be among hundreds of other links, in a footer, sidebar, inside the content?
- Is the site well respected in the industry? How much traffic do they get? (You can use compete.com to estimate site’s traffic)
If you are satisfied with the answers to all of the questions above, then its a great exchange option.
After the links exchange, make sure to check your search engine rankings and referral traffic to see if the exchange was a valuable one.