Be careful with link exchanges. Link exchanging is the process of you placing someone else's link on your web pages in exchange for them doing the same for you. Be careful of what sites you link to – you don't want your site to be linking to a bunch of low quality or unethical sites.



Be especially wary of automated link exchange programs. These systems may save you time, but they are frowned upon by the search engines and may cause you problems. Google, Yahoo, and MSN may penalize your site for using automated link exchange programs (often called link farms), or they may even ban your site.

If you decide to engage in link exchanges, be very selective about who you do it with and how many you have. Make sure the ads you do place there aren't a direct competition to what you have to offer. They should be for a product or service that is related to what you have to offer though. Try to do link exchanges with sites that will link to you from a semi-prominent page on their site.

When building links, be sure that you include your site's keywords in the anchor text of the link. For example, if your site's main keywords are buy widgets and blue widgets, you might use the anchor text buy blue widgets.

Don't get caught up in the process of placing numerous ads for other sites on your own web pages. Not only is it distracting to the customers who visit your site, but it can cost you business. When a visitor clicks a link to somewhere else there is a very high risk that they won't be returning to yours.

Building links is time consuming, but with hard work and some ingenuity, you can gain good search engine rankings.