6.1 Link Exchanges

Participating in link exchanges is a crucial part of blog promotion for any budding blogger. Link exchanges - organized and unorganized - allow bloggers and webmasters to get backlinks on sites and also allow them to add useful reasources to their own blogs or sites.

One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is by tuning your offpage factors - or all the factors that you cannot control by optimizing your blog. The most important offpage factors are the links incoming to your blog - reciprocal or one-way.

There are two important things to take into consideration when creating link text or code for future link exchanges: the text in the title and the text in the description. According to most search engine optimization experts, the text in the title is most important. You will want to put the keyphrase you wish to optimize for in the title. While there is more debate over the relevance of the text above and below the link, most experts agree that there's a good chance that it will affect how your site is ranked. For this reason, you may want to attempt to optimize it. Additionally, when you engage in link exchanges regularly, you will want to switch your title text relatively often. This will allow you to optimize for multiple keywords.

The last thing you will need to consider is how you will go about finding link parts for your blog. You can start by looking up related blogs in Blog Wise. You can then send a personal email to each of the blog owners, asking whether or not they would be interested in some link exchanges. At the same time, you should consider signing up for a free link exchange system, such as Link Metro, which will allow you to freely exchange links with other bloggers and webmasters by looking up their sites and then sending them an automated message.