The most basic way on the net to rate useful information on another site is to provide your own visitors with a link to that information on the other site. The links are the blood of the web and the reason for calling it a web or a net.

For the search engines such links have for years had three functions:

1. Links help the search engine spiders to find and index other websites and their pages.

2. The links to a site and to a specific web page is interpreted as a vote for the quality of that website.

3. The text in the link - the hyper text - is regarded as some kind of descriptor of the content to be found on the site the link is going to. And to this we can add that also the surrounding text to the links is helping the search engine to estimate what the content is about.

Until recently we could email fellow webmasters to ask for an exchange of links, the so-called link swap. This mechanism was seen as a mutually rewarding link exchange, a true win-win situation as both websites would benefit from such a two-way link exchange.

The two-way links exchange would satisfy the no. 1 function and no. 3. function for the search engines, but at the same time it would to some extent undermine the no. 2 function. Obviously a two-sided link exchange doesn’t need to be a vote for any content on any website but just a marketing tool, in fact a SEO tool, a search engine optimizing tool. Many different link exchange tools and programs have been developed to automate this process of mutual link exchange, making it easier to establish the links and to keep track of that the back links were kept alive. People easily forget what they have promised to do and to keep.

Two way links are still useful seen from a point of direct traffic generation as long as the links to your site isn’t burrowed among long lists of links to other websites. If the to way links are included in the running text of the partner site in a meaning full way it will generate some targeted traffic from visitors searching for information from the partner site. But as mentioned the search engine enhancer function doesn’t work that well anymore.

The links exchange solution

The solution the tuff way is to develop outstanding content to your website and be active in all relevant social meeting places on the web.

A much faster and more easy solution is to use mechanisms to generate one way link exchange. If you partner up with two other webmasters or with one webmaster with two relevant websites you could ask for the mechanism that you link to each other in such a way that all websites get one link but only link to another other website that is indirect link exchange in this way:

Website A links to B Website B links to C Website C links to A

This isn’t too complicated for one or a few cases of link exchange but it becomes much more complicated if you want to reach the level of 50 valuable links to your site. As the words in the link text is regarded with much interest by Google you should also variate a number of different kinds of keywords and mainly key phrases in the link text. It will unfortunately take you very much of your productive time to keep op with that, not to mention to make sure that the partners aren’t forgetting to keep the links to your site.

If you have more than one site and want to do the same for each site this is a tremendous work. Until now some keen marketers have simply outsourced that kind of work to have it done manually from people in low income countries. The cost for outsourcing the link building might be profitable as the links are so important to get. Read more about a new one way links exchange solution below.

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