Some webmasters are willing to link to any website that will link back to them. You need to be a bit more particular than this because you want to have links from Websites that are related to yours and that are Quality Sites.

Also you want the sites to be of interest to your visitors and contain information or products and services that would be beneficial to your visitors.

A Quality Site is a Website that has many inbound Links and High PageRank

Six Steps to Accomplishing Manual Link Trading:

1. Build a Links Page or Links Directory

Think about the kinds of Web Sites that will hep your Page Rank and traffic. Before you contact a webmaster or another site about trading links (let's call them Link Partners), you'll want to have a page on your site where you can put the links that point back to other sites. If you plan on accumulating a large number of these links, then you'll want to set this up as a multiple page directory with Topic and Sub-topic Categories, rather than a single page.

You can expect a better response from a potential Link Partner if they know you have a Links Page or Directory. When you contact them, you'll be able to tell them the URL of the page where you put the link to their site.

2. Determine What Kinds of Sites will Help Your Traffic

You don't start making contacts by sending a mass mailing to everyone on the Web and ask them to link to your site. This could get you into trouble for Spamming. You need to determine what kinds of sites would help your traffic and would have visitors who would be interested in your site.

What is your Target Market? You want to find Sites related to your Target Market. Let me give you an example:

Say you have a site that sells Gourmet Coffee. What's related to Gourmet Coffee? Coffee cups and mugs (especially mugs with personalized printing on them), specialty teas, coffee pots, teapots, hot cup plates or holders, coffee beans, coffee bean grinders. You get the picture!

In addition to bringing more visitors to your site, who are interested in the content of your site, getting links to your site from content related sites will give you better returns in the search engines. Google, in particular determines query matches using many factors, and one of these factors is the comparison of the content of pages linking to your pages. Here's an excerpt from Google's Search Technology page:

Google ... examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

3. Search Out Potential Link Partner Websites

Use the Internet Search Engines and Directories to find Web Sites that will help your traffic and Page Rank and Traffic. Use the Search Engines and Directories on the web.
And the best search engines are: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
And the best directories are: Open Directory Project and Yahoo!

Perform your searches by using the keywords you have chosen for your Website (See the topic on Keyword Lists and Placement), this will find the websites that are similar to yours and are also your competition.

Then check the Directories and look in the Categories that relate to your Website, as well as other categories that are similar, or in your Target Market.

4. Determine if Their Site is Worthy of Linking to Your Site?

Link Trading or Reciprocal Link Building is the exchange of links between two websites. When you are starting out with a new website, you'll want to take almost any link you can get from other sites. A link from anybody, (even a low PR site) is better than no link at all.

But, do try and get a lot of your links from sites that are relevant to your site and have quality content, regardless of their PageRank. This is what will really help you with the search engines. The search engines will give you extra points when you have links from lots of sites that relate to your content.

Beware of Link Farms
A Link Farm is a Website or set of Web pages created solely for the purpose of gaining high search engine rankings by trying to get a large number of incoming links. This kind of site has very little or no content and it consists almost entirely of pages of very long lists of unrelated links that are in no particular order.

These types of pages are penalized by almost all the search engines. Some search engines may even ban the entire site as they consider this tactic to be a kind of spamming.
Beware of Quick Link Building
Also, the search engines are watchful of websites that add a large number of links in a short period of time and many will penalize you for doing this. So using a web service that offers to sell you a large number of links for a price, might end up having a negative effect on your search engine rankings, even though it is a quick way to build your inbound links

The right way to do this is to have the service gradually add links over time so the search engines won't detect a sudden increase in links to your site. The search engines will see this as an acceptable gradual link building process

As you acquire more inbound links and your website climbs in the search engine rankings you can become more picky, concentrating mainly on getting links only from sites that have content related to yours. Hopefully you'll get some links from high PR sites but don't let this guide your entire link campaign. Getting links from high PR sites is "Icing on the Cake", but the cake needs to be made up of multiple content related links.

A PR of 6 or higher is a very high PR and would be a good page to get a link from.

If your site is not indexed by the search engines, getting a link from a PR6 page should get you indexed in a couple of days. Getting a link from a PR3 or PR4 page should get you indexed in a week or two.

The Google Toolbar is a FREE download. It will integrate with many Web browsers and it displays the PageRank of each Web page that you visit.

Go to Page 2 or click the Tutorial Next button to see the final two steps.

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