Building website traffic through the use of links is one of the oldest ways of marketing your website.  It used to be relatively easy to get these links to come in your website and people would gladly exchange links for a variety of different reasons.  First, they loved to get the direct traffic they came from links because the people were already interested in what they were talking about.  Secondly, it gave them a healthy boost to the search engine rankings and it is still possible to do so today.  The problem is, many of the search engines are now starting to ignore reciprocal links to a certain extent.  Search engine rankings that were once built on these exchanged links now seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.  Does that mean that exchanging links is dead?

Many people still exchange links on a regular basis and they do so with a lot of success.  Although the old reciprocal link directories may not work quite as well as they used to, if you’re able to exchange links in the proper way you can still get a lot of traffic to your website in a short period of time.  The real key comes in finding link partners and not simply looking for a massive amount of links.  These link partners are out there and they are willing to exchange links with you if you sweeten the pot to a certain extent.  Here is one way that you can do that.

If you have a popular website or blog that gets a lot of repeat traffic, you can display how many links you are sending to them by simply adding a link to their website on your blog.  Put in a prominent location and let it sit there for a week or two, getting people to click over to it on a regular basis.  Use a script to keep track of how many people are clicking on that link and then e-mail them that information after a week or two has expired.  If they are getting 10 or 20 clicks a day or more from you, they would be more willing to add a link to your website in return.  The hardest part about doing this is waiting for the initial period to end but getting a decent link from another website will make it all worth the effort.

Of course, you don’t need to stick with exchanging links in order to get some inbound traffic.  You can get incoming links in a variety of different ways such as article writing, leaving comments on other blogs and forum marketing.  As long as you do these things properly, you would be surprised with the amount of traffic that will come your way.  Reciprocal links still have their place and they will probably always work to a certain extent.  Make sure that you make them a part of your marketing effort and you will be happy that you’ve done so.