Geeks On Site: How your website will benefit from link exchange

May 7, 2010 - PRLog -- Have you ever found yourself navigating to a website that had nothing to do with what you originally set out to find? Sure you have. The charm of the Internet is that you can find information on almost any topic you want; and a bunch of information you didn’t even know to look for. Countless links connect Internet pages to one another, constituting what we understand as the World Wide Web. The use of links has however evolved from the early days of the Internet.

To put it simply, link exchange means adding another website’s hyperlink to your own site, and in return getting your site’s link featured on the other website’s page (usually links or resources page). This type of linking is called reciprocal linking. Other types of linking include:

•   One-way linking: this is a hyperlink to another website without a link back to yours.
•   Multi-way linking: websites partner up with three or more sites, with the agreement to create one-way links so that each website has a one-way non-reciprocal link (X links to Y, Y links to M, M links to X).
•   Resource linking: this type connects websites and/or specific web pages with information useful and relevant to one another.
•   Incestuous linking: connects a collection of websites from the same source, e.g., linking a company’s homepage with its social networking sites and blogs.

Prior to Google, many popular search engines would rank pages according to how strongly the search term would associate with the resulting page, e.g., how many times the search term would appear in the page’s text. Instead, Google’s PageRank algorithm, developed by Google founders Page and Brin, calculates the relevance of a website in terms of human-generated links pointing to it.  The basic assumption is that websites linked from important pages are themselves important.

Google PageRank is however in constant development in response to growing traffic and spam, for example the latest search algorithms favor websites that maintain a high level of one-way links, instead of reciprocal links. The relevance of the links pointing toward your page also plays a role of importance: having too many irrelevant and low quality links pointing to and from your website may even cause your site to be penalized by the search engine. Many other Google PageRank criteria remain secret in order to keep the search engine results accurate and favorable to the public.

In conclusion, link exchange is used primarily as an SEO strategy. Driving traffic to your website through link exchange is a legitimate way of increasing your site’s ranking, but before engaging in a campaign of link exchange you should keep in mind the following three principles:

•   Quality. Quantity is important but like in most things, it does not serve a purpose without quality. Only link to websites that you have checked out yourself, and that have equal or higher web ranking than yours.
•   Relevance. Link exchange is more successful for both parties if the web contents have some relevance to each other. You will also be contributing positively to the online surfer’s navigating experience.  
•   Content. The content of your own website will ultimately determine its popularity. Rather than focusing on external ways of getting your site linked to the public, remember that the final product you are selling is your website itself. Make it pleasing to the eye and the content with value to its readers.

To exchange links with Geeks On Site, check out our website http://www.geeksonsiteusa.com and send us an email at publicrelations@geeksonsiteusa.com.

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