Trade Free Links w/Other Websites
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Search Engine Optimization
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No Money? How To Acquire Links Free!
by Walt Thiessen
December 15, 2004
What if you have no money to spend on buying links, yet you want to improve your website's rankings? Well, here's a short course in how-to-do-it.
Acquiring links through link trades (aka link exchanges) is a well-documented way to improve website rankings. It takes time and energy, and you have to dedicate 60 minutes each day to do it. Plus, it takes a few hours to set up your whole program before you can even begin. But once you're set up, an hour a day can bring you a few links a day. Do this every day and your backlink count soon will be in the hundreds.
Set Up Your Links Pages
The art of exchanging links is all about putting links to other websites on your website, while they reciprocate by putting your link on their website. This means you'll have to set up some extra pages on your website, linked from the home page. It's best to decide what categories of websites you're willing to exchange links with, then set up a separate page for each category. All the links pages should be interlinked to each other and should also point to your home page. Further, there should be a small link somewhere on your home page that links to your first links page. If possible, it's even better to link to all of your links pages from your home page. The option is yours.
Since the pages are new, their current PR is 0. It'll take a month or so for Google to spider them and add them to their database. Once that happens, the PR level will increase for these new pages. If you can afford to wait a month before you start requesting link exchanges with other webmasters, it will greatly improve your chances. However, this isn't a requirement. Just be prepared for poorer-than-average reciprocation rates from other webmasters during your first month.
Install the Google Toolbar
The Google Toolbar is a rough way of measuring the PR value of your own pages and of the pages of websites you're going to exchange links with. You can install it by visiting Google's Toolbar website. The toolbar includes a PageRank indicator that will show a green progress bar that indicates the PageRank level of the current page you're visiting on a scale from 0 to 10.
Develop Your Tracking System
If you're serious about building links, you're going to need to keep track of who you've contacted, how often you've contacted them, and what their responses were. There are many ways to do this. The best way for you is the one you are most comfortable applying to your business. I personally use a combination of Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel to track my requests. My method is rather complex, so I won't try to detail it here for a beginner to use. Instead, here's a method that was developed by a friend of mine named John Gergye, who tracks his links campaigns using Microsoft Word.
He begins each day by finding about 20 potential linking candidates. There are lots of ways to do this.
Search engines are the obvious choice. Do some searches on keywords for sites in the category with whom you're looking to exchange links. A good source is Link Partners, which is a search engine full of websites that are known to be looking for linking partners. Also, don't forget to offer to trade links with us here at Dirt Cheap Advertising by visiting our resources page.
Once you have your 20 potential linking candidates for the day, your next step is to place them on your links pages. Yes, do this first. Show them what they're going to get, before you ask them to reciprocate. As a webmaster, I find there's nothing more annoying than being contacted by someone who wants me to do all the work applying to them for a link exchange. After all, asking for a link that day was their idea, not mine. Making me do their work for them is insulting, and I usually just trash those requests (particularly since they usually come from webmasters offering PR0 web pages that do me no good at all. Stupid amateurs!)
Once you've placed their links on your pages, track them in Word. In a Word file, put your 20 potential linking candidates for the week. Including the category and links page where my link should appear. Sort them by those to email and those with a form to fill out. You don't have to do that. It's just that it goes about 50% faster if you do it that way.
Contact Webmasters
Start with our Link Traders Directory for leads. Send emails and/or fill in online forms for the 20 candidate sites from you you're requesting a link trade. Then highlight the completed ones in yellow. That way in a glance you can see which ones have been approached for a link swap. It's important to also note the date you did so.
When the confirmations roll in, change the highlight to green. That way you won't re-contact them by accident.
In a second page, put the links page into a verification list. This is just to make sure your new link partners did what they said they would do.
Follow Up
Finally before re-contacting the webmasters who haven't responded, check their links pages to see if they reciprocated without notifying you. Sometimes a link will go up without notification. There's no sense in aggravating anyone. Also, give it about six weeks before you contact those who didn't reply a second time. Some webmasters are slow to respond and hate to be pushed.
Tracking The Results
After you've contacted them twice, save the list for future reference. Just because they didn't reply this time doesn't mean they might not reply six months from now. And saving the list will also make it easier to remember whether you've already contacted a particular website in the past. There have been many times I've found the same website twice when looking for link partners, but I didn't recognize it from the last time. Having a central list I can check helps immensely.
Success Rate
On average, you should be able to get about 4-5 new link partners a day, because you'll find that about 20-25% will reply, on average. If your link pages are still new and showing PR0, that response rate will remain around 10% until they get indexed by Google. Once your website achieves PR5 or higher, you'll find that your response rate will reach as high as 40%.
