Blogging Tips: Link Swapping

If you are a blogger, who is trying to generate income from your website or blog, then you may find this post helpful. Having a lot of back links to your site will help you rank higher in search engines and will bring more traffic to your website. There are some important things that you need to know about link swapping, or back linking to your site. There are several things to consider including making sure your links are being reciprocated and checking the page rank of your link swaps. In this post I am going to cover a link swapping site, manual swapping and a page ranking checking tool.

Link Market Link Market.net When I first started my blog, I read a lot of posts and articles that discussed how important creating back links to your site is. I naturally searched for link swapping sites and came across Link Market. I had to learn the innerworkings of this site via trial and error, and here is where I will provide my experience to you.

First of all, you should know that there are 2 options with this site. Option 1 is a free membership, however you can only receive link requests from people, and can not intiate requests of your own. The problem with that is you may receive a lot of links from people that are not relavant to the theme of your blog or site. The down side to that is that people that surf their site may not be interested in visiting your site. Although, this may be the case anyway as some of the sites that send you requests have link pages which are remote or hard to find. In that instance, you will not attract additional traffic from these links.

In option 2 with Link Market, you pay $25 for a 6 month membership with their site. Some of the benefits of the membership are that you can send link requests, sort pages by Google Page Rank and get free customer support. Obviously if you are making the link requests you can target sites that have content which is more relavant for your sites theme. You can also target sites with a higher page rank, which in turn will help your page rank. To me, this option isn't worth it at this time, because I am not really generating that much income from my site, but could be a decent option down the road.

Manual Blog Swapping This is one of the best ways to get relavant back links to your site, and also one of the most time consuming. The concept is pretty easy, simply do a Web Search for blogs along the same theme as yours and pay them a visit. However if you simply visit them and send them an email right off the bat, you may not see a high percentage of successful responses. You need to dedicate a little bit of time to reading the blog, maybe posting some comments to the articles on their sites, and actually building a relationship with the fellow blog writers. You will see higher percentages of link requests that way.

While you are at their site, some of the blogs allow html links when you post a comment, so write them a comment and post your URL in there. Just make sure it is something more than "Good Post". You can also link to them first and send them an email with a link to your link page showing them. And hey, if you happen to see an ad link on their site that you find interesting, I am sure they will appreciate it if you visit that link from their site. :)


Page Rank Checking Tool PR Checking Tool.com I am not going to cover the entire scope of Page Rank and what it means in this post, however I will provide you with this helpful tool to check Page Rank of sites requesting a link to you if you use a service like Link Market. With the PR Checking Tool, you enter the URL of the site you want to check, enter the spam checking code and click the submit link. The tool will provide you with the rank of the site from either 1, 5 or 30 different data centers. A site with a Rank of 0 is the lowest, while one with a rank of 9 is among the highest. Obviously, you want more relavant links from sites with a high page rank.

I hope you found this information helpful. Please feel free to surf through some of the other articles on my site, or post a comment below.

Thanks.

Dan