Once you become a site owner you will get a lot of requests
to swap links with other sites in an attempt to increase
your search ranking and the reciprocal's site ranking. There
is nothing wrong with this in itself, however, there are
a few things you need to know in order to make this a successful
practice.
It has been suggested that the more links to your site
the better. This is not the case. It has more to do with
the quality of links rather than the amount of links to
your site. If you have 100 links to your site from sites
that have poor or no ranking, it will not do you as much
good as having five links to your site with rankings between
three and ten. The reason for this is search engines put
more importance into sites that have higher rankings, so
if you are linked to from one of these sites, you will be
seen with more importance than if you are linked to from
a site that has no ranking.
Be careful who you link to. If you link to a site that
violates any or the search engines rules such as hidden
text, gateway pages and so on, you will actually be penalized
for their dishonesty.
Avoid link farms and link exchange programs. These are
methods used to boost rankings and, while they work in the
short term, once the search engines find them, they penalize
them and you too.
Make sure the reciprocal site's links page is not hidden
from searches. The website may have a high ranking, but
the links page is not listed or even ranked. This will do
you no good whatsoever. To find out a site's page ranking,
you will need to to download Google's tool bar. Follow this
link to Google's site to download their tool bar.
Try to focus your links to sites that are relevant to
your site. For example, if you offer a limo service, try
to be linked to from sites like hotels, tourist information
sites and sites like that. While this will only make a moderate
difference to ranking, you will have a better chance of
your links actually being visited by people rather than
just a web crawlers. That is the whole point after all.
Catching the crooks
The enemy within
Batteries not included
System Requirements
To flash or not to flash
Perception is not
reality
Guaranteed
top ranking on search engines
Truth about link swapping
What
you can do and what you should do