Link exchange is an important concept in improving your page rank level in addition to improving your search engine position. For those of you who don't know what page rank is, it is the numeric value of 0-10 that google gives to website in how important it views them. Link exchange is a way for search engines to tell how important other website view your site.
Trade with ranked sites
This is one of the most important things. When trading with a site, make sure you view the rank of link page of the site your trading with. The website might be high ranked but they might be purposely causing there reciprocal link page to not be ranked. For example they might be telling the robots to not got there via the no-follow html tag.
Don't trade links with link farms
Only trade links with sites that have less then 50 outgoing links. Also make sure you don't link to over 50 sites. Search engines don't like to see sites with lots of outgoing links.
Change Title
When trading links, don't use the same title in all of your link exchange. A better way to describe the importance of this is to show you what search engines are looking for. If people were to just normally link to your site because they like it and find it a good source they wouldn't all use the same tag for the link. Each person would use something unique. The search engines know this, which is why they weed out things that have the same link.
Change Description
The description is not as important in changing as the title is, but the same philosophy follows. Search engines don't want to see the same thing over and over so don't do this.
Link with similar sites
Although it is easy to get Viagra, and prescription sites to link to your site don't do it unless your in that business. Links from similar sites are some of the most important sites out there. If you get irrelevant links your ranking will drop. Don't do it as your just wasting your time.
Don't go after the big dog
This is one of the first mistakes I made in my first attempts for link exchange. I was trying to trade links with my vacation rental site. http://www.fastvacationrentals.com but I was trying to trade links with very highly ranked websites. To my surprise, not really, I didn't get one response from this. I had a little bit more luck trying to trade links with less popular sites that weren't as important. What I found out that worked best was trading links with sites that are related in the tourist business or personal sites from individual people. Even though these sites aren't as popular, they are still ranked very high in there niche. This is a vital and very important link exchange.
Check links afterwards
Unfortunately, there are still people that cheat there way in link exchange. They don't keep your link up, or they use the tag no-follow. This causes a lot of problems and doesn't benefit you at all. Usually I keep an excel sheet that I keep track of when I last checked to make sure it existed.
Post in blogs and Forums
This is still a good easy way to get links back to your site but you have to be careful. An example of doing this is posting in a travel related forum. Eventually those forums get higher ranked and you in return will have a link back to your site. The thing is, you have to be careful to make sure there isn't a no-follow tag on your link
Write articles
Articles are another quick an easy way to get links back to your site. There are several sites that keep track of content. This content is than free to use if you keep a link back to the owner. In addition to making this an easy link exchange it also allows you to create content which is also vital in the SEO process.
As you can see, there are a lot of things that go into SEO. I can't possibly cover everything because it is changing on an everyday process, and by the time you read this it will probably be outdated. A smart thing to keep in mind is to act like a search engine. They are scripting the spiders to be smarter and smarter and to act like a human to find relevant material. When working on your site keep this in mind. If you do your sure to keep your site ideal for SEO.
