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.
