How to Get Your Link Exchange Reciprocated Correctly

One of the SEO, or search optimization, benefits of link exchanges is receiving a “vote” to your site using specific keywords.  The way to gain this vote is to use anchor text for the link to your site. 

For example, if your website is called companyname.com and you sell sliding doors, then you would want your website to come up in search results when some types in the keywords “sliding doors” as opposed to having to know your company by name.  One of the ways to do this is to get quality backlinks from other sites using the anchor text of “sliding doors” to link to your website.

Whenever you send or receive a link exchange request, the best method to use is to specify exactly how you would like your link to appear on the reciprocal or three-way link page.  To do this using the example site, simply send the linking details as follows:

Title: Sliding Doors (use this as the anchor text to link to the URL)

URL: http://www.companyname.com

Description: Company Name sells quality sliding doors at affordable prices.

This should help eliminate any confusion as to how you want your link to appear, and helps novice webmasters add your link correctly, as opposed to just putting the URL or some other text as the link to your page.  

The Basics of Link Exchanges

With the amounts and types of email that businesses receive on a daily basis, it is no surprise that some will have a difficult time deciphering the legitimate requests from the spam.  One of those requests is for link exchanges between one website and another. 

There are two different types of link exchanges.  The first type is a reciprocal link exchange, where website A links to website B, and vice versa.  The second type is a three-way link exchange, where website A links to website B, and website B gets a link back from website C. 

So how can you tell the difference between a spam request and an authentic one? 

First, you will need to check the site that you are being asked to place on your site.  Does this look like a reputable business, with a clean design and easy to find contact information?

Second, you will need to find if the reciprocating site’s link page is accessible from the homepage of their website, whether in the header, footer, sidebar menus, or in the homepage text.  Link pages, or directories, can be referred to in different ways, such as:

• Friendly Links
• Friendly Sites
• Useful Links
• Partner Links
• Link Exchange
• Link Directory
• Resources
• Resource Directory

Third, you will want to check out the page where your site’s link will appear.  If it is a three-way link exchange, this means you will want to not only check out the site you are linking to, but the site that will be linking back to you.  Sometimes, the page you are linking to will be reputable, the site linking back will be much less desirable.  The things to watch out for are:

• Link Farms - pages with hundreds or more links
• Bad neighborhoods - pages with links to sites with adult content, online pharmacies, etc.

Reviewing these basic things when receiving a linking request will assure you a quality link exchange.