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By: Edward Gause
Simply put, a link exchange (also called reciprical link) means you add a link to a related site on your web site and the webmaster of the other site adds a link to your site on their's.
Building inbound links to your site can improve your rankings in search engines by raising your link popularity.
Typically, to build a link exchange, you would search for sites that are in the same general category as yours but do not directly compete with you.
As you locate these sites, you would add these sites to your "links" page and then contact the webmaster of the other sites, let them know you added a link to their site and would they be interested in doing the same for your site.
If you want to learn how to properly ask for a link exchange, read the following article:
How To Ask For Reciprocal Links
http://trinale.com/articles/reciprocal_links.htm
For this lesson, we're going to learn how to save some time searching for related sites and manually adding links.
To start, create a new folder on your server and name it "links" or "mylinks" or something similar.
You will then need to visit PHPJunkYard.com and download the following free script:
PHP Reciprocal Links Manager
http://www.phpjunkyard.com/php-link-manager.php
Once you unzip the file to your hard drive and follow the included instructions to set it up the configuration file. It's very easy and only takes a few minutes to complete.
After you've completed the configurations, upload all the required files to the folder you created above. The best feature about this script is that a link to your site has to already be added to the webmaster's page before it will accept a request.
One of the files that you will have to edit is "swap.html". This is the page you will send potential link exchange partners to add their data. To get an idea of how it should appear, take a look at my current setup at:
http://www.trinale.com/linkmgr/swap.html
Now for the next step, you will want to visit and Register for the SiteSell Value Exchange:
http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/netsales5.html
By registering (it's also free), you agree that you're willing to exchange links with other sites that have similar content. Before I even had the chance to browse the other member sites, I started receiving requests to exchange links from others!
Finally, to automated the entire process, you will need an autoresponder to reply to exchange requests you receive.
If you don't have your own, you can get a one free at:
GetResponse.com
http://www.getresponse.com
or
Aweber.com
http://www.aweber.com
Both are very good and simple to setup. You need to setup only one autoresponse message. This is where you thank the webmaster for requesting a link exchange with you and ask them to visit your "swap" page to submit their web site information.
That's it in a nutshell. I didn't go into full details on every single process to keep this article brief as possible. If you need any assistance setting up your script, autoresponder or anything else, please call on me.
About the Author
Edward Gause is a relatively new Internet marketer who wants to share his personal do's and don'ts with other newbies.
"Don't just tell me what to do, show me how to do it."
Visit Edward at: http://trinale.com/
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