Where to get it:

Forums and Other Help: Scrub the Web offers free Search Engine Optimization, help with Meta Tags and a free web page analyzer.

SEO Promotion & SEO Positioning forum Linking strategies, site optimization and more.

WebPro Forum Free site reviews, advice on programming, scuttlebutt about Google and some good link exchange offers.

Link Exchanges:



StarLinker.com: Reciprocal Links Page Manager
Fully automated links page management solution. Free and paying accounts. StarLinker is conscientious about handholding.

Links Manager Automates the process. Create an interactive, fully-automated links page.

Link Partners.com Free categorized directory

Reciprocal Link Exchange Link Popularity
Reciprocal link exchange community. Spam free, and leaves no footprints behind.

Links - Text Link Exchange.

Autolinktrader Free for manual exchange, $5.95 a month for automated exchange.

Business Link Exchange
An easy way to exchange links with business sites.

LinkLasso.com - Web Directory and Search Engine


Link Purchasing

Link Exchange
One way text link advertisements. You can buy or sell text link advertisements at LinkAdage Auctions.

MarketBanker offers text boxes for a flat rate.


Banner Exchanges:

Flashbanger.com If you're not a graphic designer, you can buy an animated banner starting at $20.

5n4.com traffic exchange. Offers free banner and text exchanges.

BannerXchange Free

Freee Banner Displays are the new kid on the block. They're offering a one to one ratio.

Free-Banners.com Shows your banner once for every two times you show one of theirs. Or you can buy 60,00 impressions (showings of your banner) for $89.

BannersGoMLM.com Free membership. Full one to one exchange rate. Free automated "Banner Wizards" to help you create a banner.

ads4ever Not exactly a banner exchange, this program gives you ad credits every time you view their pages or refer someone else.

ontheweb.com: Banner Exchanges

Boxes - Link Box Exchange


Advertising Programs:


Kanoodle offers pay-per-click advertising. Your listing shows up in their search results, so people who click on it are presumably interested in what you have to offer.

Fineclicks.com $350 initial deposit goes toward paying for your ads.

Mighty Banners! You don't have to be an artist and you don't have to sacrifice quality for price. Make professional looking banners in minutes using Mighty Banners. Free to try!

[Cultivate Links] [Exchange Banners] [Exchange Hits] [Join an Affiliate Program]

Cultivate Links

Google judges your site not only by how it's constructed and how much content there is on it, but by how many other sites link to it. If you have a relatively narrow topic (e.g., postcard collecting), you may already know most of the sites that are related in topic to your own. Write the webmasters of these sites and suggest an exchange of links. If you think a site will be usefu to your visitors, link to it even if you don't get a reciprocal link. It will make your own site more informative.

The goal of reciprocal linking is to get and provide qualified traffic to and from other websites that complement yours. The process of swapping links is time consuming but worth the effort. You can tell quickly and easily how many "backlinks" your site has by using the link popularity checker above.

Important New Development in reciprocal linking: Google's Jagger Update

Google has caught wise to the exchange of links just for its own sake. If you are going to go to the trouble of exchanging links, make sure they are relevant to the content of your site. Otherwise, Google will discount them!!

If you don't necessarily know of sites you want to trade links with, there are categorized directories of websites that trade reciprocal links. The easiest to use free exchange, in my experience, is The Better Linking Exchange. They do the link creation for you once you create a links page by following their instructions. The nice features about this link exchange are that you have full power over which links you do or do not accept, and the links are nicely categorized for you. The drawback is that there are not that many members. Even so, you can get a dozen good, related links out of it, which is a great start. Another up and coming link exchange is Zeen.

Before you start trading links, make sure to download Alexa's free toolbar. Alexa ranks sites by how much traffic they get, so you can judge better whether a site is worth linking to. They also list related sites, so you can get suggestions of similar sites that might want to trade with you.

If you have more money than time, there are automated link exchanges that supply links for you. StarLinker provides 20 free links, 50 links for $49.95 a year or 100 for $99.95. You can also buy non-reciprocal links. There's a brisk business in buying and selling links at sites like Market Banker and LinkAdage.

On the other hand, if you have time and patience, trading links can be a nice way to get to know some of your competitors and familiarize yourself with similar sites. Some link exchangers are quite generous with their encouragement and expertise.

Link exchangers prefer you to have a nicely organized links page, clearly locatable from your home page. See the one on this site for an example

A word of warning: some people ask you to put links written in Javascript on your page. Since Javascript only executes when you open the page, search engines don't find these links, so they're not going to increase your PR (Page Rating).

More about exchanging links >

Search for more:

Exchange Banners

A banner is an ad, usually 468x60 pixels big, like the ones at the bottom of this page. A Banner Exchange allows you to display your ad on other sites in exchange for displaying their ad on yours. In less than a month BannerXchange generated 472 hits for the site you are visiting now at a cost of $0. Please note, however, that hits are NOT the same as visits! Every time you display someone else's banner, that's counted as a "hit".

A variation on this idea is a text link exchange, such as txtswap.com (See the txtswap ad in the right hand column of this page.) Some webmasters find text ads to be more effective than banners. You can also use contextual text swaps, such as this one: Links - Text Link Exchange.

If you don't want to put ads on your site, there are websites that will sell you a contextual link on other people's sites. Market Banker sells Google-like text boxes. "Publishers" list their sites and the amount they want, you purchase the ad through Market Banker. Link Adage runs auctions. You pick a site that sounds interesting and then bid on a link.

Exchange Hits

If you're primarily interested in just getting the number of visitors up, you can spend a few minutes a day surfing via a Hit Exchange such as Hit Safari. You look at other people's sites and in return they look at yours. This is VERY boring as almost all the sites are get-rich-quick schemes or other hit exchange sites. BE VERY CAREFUL. Before you sign up for any of the offers you see, make sure you install a Spyware detection program such as Spybot, which is free, AND a virus protection program such as McAfee VirusScan Online. Otherwise, you run a large risk of having your PC infected by unscrupulous people. Do NOT join a Free For All (FFA) program. They're just an invitation to spammers.

Join an Affiliate Program

This is a variant on a pay-per-click search engine. You offer people who have websites a commission of your sales, a few dollars per lead, or a few cents per "click" (visitor). You'll pay less per click than Google, but you may get fewer clicks unless a lot of affiliates sign up. One advantage of using affiliates is that it raises the number of sites that link to you, without your having to link back. Google values non-reciprocal links more highly than link exchanges.






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