Quality more important than quantity when it comes to link exchanges

As you know, link popularity – the number of inbound links pointing to your XSite – is an important component to your ranking with search engines. The idea being that each time someone links to your website, that's a vote for your site. Therefore, the more sites that link to your site, the better you'll rank on the search engines, right?

Wrong.

The quest to increase your link popularity should not entail sending out mass e-mails asking to exchange links with anyone with a website. Nor should it ever involve exchanging links with link farms – sites created specifically to link to other sites with no content of their own. Link farms are not only considered spam by search engines, but they hinder people who are looking for good information.

Similarly, if your linking partner posts your URL a page with hundreds of unsorted or unrelated links, it won't help you in the search engines because that website is not likely to send you much traffic.

When it comes to link exchanges, the best way to increase your ranks in the search engines is by linking with other quality, information-rich websites that don't compete with you for business. But you must also consider the popularity of your linking partners as some linking partners could do you more harm than good with rankings.

One way find out whether a website will boost your search engine rankings is to check its Page Rank on Google. To do this, download the Google Toolbar (The bar that rests above the page portion of your web browser and allows you to do a Google search without visiting the Google website) with the advanced features. Then, type in your own web address and check your site ranking by scrolling your mouse over the PageRank icon on the toolbar. Google ranks a page from 0-10 – with a zero meaning a website has no links at all. Therefore, to improve your ranking, you should aim to link with a website that has a ranking equal or higher than yours. For more information on how Google Page Rank works, click here. Remember, it takes time to build quality link exchanges – don't expect your rank to improve overnight. As we've said before, there is no way of knowing just when a search engine spider will crawl your site. Good luck!