Increasing Hits by Improving the Link Popularity of Your Site

3) Exchanging links with other webmasters

Another way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites that are related to yours, but are not in direct competition. Here's how you can do it:

First, open a database program like Microsoft Access and create a new table containing fields like FirstName, LastName, Email Address, URL etc. Then, make a list of the sites belonging to your competitors. Then, go to AltaVista, and type in the
following in the search box:

link:somesite.com -url:somesite.com

Where somesite.com is the domain name of one of your competitors. This will give you a list of all the sites that are linking to that competitor. Then, find out in what context a particular site has linked to your competitor. If this site is an affiliate of your competitor, then your chance of getting a link from this site is limited, unless you offer an even better affiliate program. However, if you find that this site has a Links page that contains links to other sites, one of which is a link to your competitor, then it is an excellent prospect for exchanging links. Find out the name and email address of the Webmaster of the site and add them to your database. In this way, go through all of the sites that are linking to your competitors, locate those sites which you think may want to exchange links with you, and build up your database.

Once you have done that, create a Links page in your site, and add the URLs of these sites to the Links page. Then, send an email to these webmasters, introducing yourself and your site. Congratulate them on building an excellent web site, tell them that you have already added a link to their site from yours and then ask them whether they would be kind enough to add a link to your site. In your email, emphasize the fact that exchanging links in this way will be mutually beneficial for both of you because it will help both of you drive traffic to your sites.
Wait for a month or so to see the response. Some webmasters will agree to link to you. Others will simply not respond. After a month, remove the links to those sites that are not interested in exchanging links and using the methods outlined above, try to locate more sites with which to exchange links.

When you send the email to the webmasters, make sure that you personalize each email. Don't begin every email with "Hello Webmaster", begin with "Hello Mike". If you want, you can use email merge programs to automatically personalize each email. You can check out some email merge programs by going to www.download.com and searching for "email merge" (without the quotes).

The main problem with this method of improving the link popularity of your site is that it takes a lot of time. You may find that the number of links you manage to get does not justify the time that you spend on it. Hence, my advice is to try it once and see how it works out. If you manage to get a lot of links, then repeat the process. If not, don't bother with this any more. However, even though you are not actively seeking out other sites with which to exchange links, always be on the lookout for a linking opportunity. If, while surfing the Net, you come across a site that is extremely relevant to your site but is not a competitor, write to the Webmaster and propose an exchange.

Another thing that you can do is to mention in your Links page that you are willing to exchange links with other web sites. This allows other webmasters who come to your web site to propose a link exchange.