Sunday, 3 February 2008

Doing a Link Exchange

During the 8 or so years I've been designing websites I've found one of the biggest challenges to be that of getting people to actually see the website that I've designed.

There are many different ways to do this such as promoting social bookmarking websites like StumbleUpon and Digg, creating your own site community and of course the evil spamming (something I'll never sink so low as to attempt). Probably the best form of advertising though is getting a "link exchange" with another site.

A link exchange requires you to place a link to a site on your own website and that site will, in return, place a link to your site on theirs. It works so well that most of my sites' major referrals are from links from other sites. Google search results are always a close second though ironically enough the more links you have from other sites to your site, the higher Google will rank you in their results. This also works both ways as someone might find your site in Google and want to do a link exchange. Both of these methods really work off of each other.

An exception to this though is my small but growing no smoking cafe, bar and restaurant guide blog, SmokeFreeJapan.com which gets about 95% of it's visitors from StumbleUpon something I don't even advertise on that site yet.

A cool site I just found that can automatically create a link exchange for you is Link Exchange Experts who run a free "volunteer" link exchange program where you add some code to your site to display a link from their database while your site's link will appear on other volunteers' sites in "exchange".

They also let you buy text links if you just want other sites to link to yours while keeping your own site clutter free.

There's a great page on link building which explains in more detail how search engines like Google and Yahoo rank sites and why link building is a good idea.

If you want to get your site out there, give it a go. Link Exchanges really are one of the best ways to advertise your site which is why I'll personally start accepting link exchange requests once more as of today.

If you have a Japan or Aussie related blog or site and want to do an exchange, let me know!

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