Every website owner wants more traffic. Traffic means sales. Traffic means attention. Traffic means success. There are many ways to increase web site traffic, but the two most widely used methods are advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). This article focuses on one well known but misunderstood aspect of SEO, the link exchange.

A link exchange is an arrangement between two web sites where each site adds a link which points to the other site. The idea is simple: if you get lots of links pointing to your site, the search engines (particularly Google) will consider your site more valuable and will reward your site with a high ranking. If your site's ranking is high enough that it appears on the first page when someone searches for your keyword, you'll receive lots of free traffic and all the rewards which come with that.

I have an online pharmacy site which I have had to market exclusively through SEO. Most search engines do not allow online pharmacies to advertise (including the legal ones like mine!). As a result, I have experimented with a number of link exchange methods over the years.

Up until 2005, I found link exchanges to be very effective at improving my search engine rankings. I swapped links liberally and found myself in the top 10 on Yahoo and MSN for 4-5 keywords per site. My business grew at a nice rate and I was quite happy. Initially, I sought web sites which had link swap pages where I could simply add my site, and then I'd manually add their site to mine. This worked well, but was labor intensive. It seemed impossible to achieve my goals: I wanted thousands of links for each of a dozen sites. This would require several hours per day every day for a year to achieve.

In an effort to take a shortcut, I decided to join several different automated link swap sites- you know the ones. For $10-$30/month, you get thousands of incoming links, and your outbound links directory is built automatically by the link swap company. None of these sites ever improved my ranking or resulted in significant traffic. I consider these services to be useless.

About a year ago, I joined a semi-automatic link swap service. This particular service requires you to request links trades from other sites using the same service, or to approve/deny incoming requests form other sites on the service. The real benefit is the site automatically builds your links pages and posts them to your web site, saving about 5 minutes per link. I've used this service with considerable success- I now have about 800 links on each of my sites, and it only takes me a few minutes per day to keep up.

As a result of my link trades, my search engine rankings have been gradually rising, but I'm experiencing an unexpected greater benefit to my trades: I'm getting traffic (and sales) from people who are clicking over to my site from the sites I've traded with. At present, about 80% of my traffic comes from inbound links, and only 20% comes from search engines. This is great news for me and is something you should strive to accomplish. While search engine rankings can rise and fall as the search engines change their algorithms, natural traffic coming from inbound links is far less vulnerable to change. It's the most reliable form of traffic you can get!

Many SEO experts believe link swaps have ceased to build search engine rankings- that one way inbound links are the only links which can do that. This may well be true, but one way links are hard to get unless you pay for them. Link swaps are easy to get, and they generate real traffic for you, the kind which isn't subject to the whims of the search engines. Keep trading links, but find an efficient way to do so, and you'll continue to grow your web site traffic for years to come!

Copyright 2006 David Herring