One of the best ways to ensure a steady flow of targeted traffic to your website is by ranking high in the search engines for particular keywords and key phrases that define your business. Backlinks are one of the vital tools that can help you rank higher - but you don't have to spend hours each day on trading links manually.

The alternative comes from automated link exchange software and directories. Websites offer you such opportunities like getting links from other webmasters who have joined the same program. A few examples of these link exchange directories are:

o http://www.Gotlinks.com

o http://www.Linkdiy.com

One of the most interesting offers on the market today is, however, automated linking, which follows the same "lazy linking" theme but also creates extra incentive for it's members: when someone signs up, they get a 50% monthly commission from everyone who signs up under them.

o http://www.MyLinkMachine.com

Lazy linking versus manual link exchanges

One of the cons associated to automated linking websites is that you don't have so much control over who your link partners are and on the status of your backlinks. While this was a real problem a few years ago, when the links were directed to your site in bulk and you had absolutely no way of filtering them, today all great automated link exchange websites offer 100% control over your link partners.

In other words, you can filter out website link exchange partners that are not related to the topic your website is on (this is really important with the search engines, who want to see backlinks from related websites).

Since this major argument against automated link exchanges has been eliminated, we are mostly left with the benefits:

* Save time - since everything is automated, you don't have to check your email, get the code from a link partner, go into your web editing software, do the exchange and then send confirmation to the other webmaster. With link directories like MyLinkMachine.com, the website does all that for you.

* Get more link partners - it's so much easier to find link partners in a common area such as the link exchange directories, rather than emailing individual webmasters who might not even be interested in an exchange.

* Get more links than you could ever get with manual link exchange - the truth is that manual link exchange demands a lot of time and patience, not to mention an excellent organizational skill to manage all your link exchanges.

Automated link exchanges eliminate all these difficulties and it will only take you minutes to accomplish what a manual link exchange campaign would take at least a few hours.