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.

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