SEO | Link Building | Ad Exchange

As most webmasters have probably noticed, link building via link exchange is making a strong come back. I have a number of sites that are receiving link exchange requests almost every day now. I think SEO experts are seeing great value in diversifying their link portfolio, and link trades are making up a good portion of that portfolio.

I asked a couple of our best link traders if they’d share some advice on link building through link exchanges. These link builders are averaging a 25% conversion rate on link trades and are completing a boat load of links each month.

Aubrey’s advice

Aubrey cranked out 77 reciprocal and triangle link trades last month with a 25% conversion rate. All trades targeted industry-relevant websites.

On looking for trades:
1. Start at a relevant site and use their links pages to find partners. This is a lot easier than always looking through a search engine for people to link to, and it gives you quite a list.

2. Bookmark! If you find a site that has good resources, make sure you keep a note of that page. This way you don’t forget it if you wanted to trade with them or their partners. This works best if you keep different bookmark lists for each site that you own.

On trading:
1. Trade with a variety of websites. Sites that are related, sites that are slightly related, or even sites that aren’t related but are willing to link to you. As long as their sending page checks out good (indexed with no robots or nofollows, etc), there is no reason to pass up a link from an indexed page.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for a trade other than a reciprocal. Even if they have a reciprocal form, sometimes a simple personal email will do the trick and you will both be able to benefit from a triangle or a parallel trade. The worst they can say is no, or, “I only accept reciprocals” , in which case it’s still a good deal.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for a different page than the one that they put you link on. Gently explain your reasons, and let them know that you are giving them a quality page and that you would love to arrange the trade in a way that will benefit both partners equally.

4 Ask the webmaster if they have any additional sites they would like to trade with or include in a trade.

5 Ignore page rank for the most part. It’s still important, but it’s always changing. A webmaster may require for your site to have a certain page rank before they link back to you. Example: webmaster wants a PR 2 for a page that doesn’t have any page rank. Solution: Don’t back down from requesting the trade. Email them and let them know that since both partners pages are of good quality, a link back from your site will benefit them with or without having to have pagerank.

6 Pay attention to Cashed, Indexed, and make sure the site doesn’t have any robots blocking spiders from following your link. Also make sure you check for nofollows, noindex and frames. Remember, Pagerank is just the icing on the cake if it is present.

7 If your link is removed, email the webmaster and ask why. You never know, they could have had their site hacked or had a crash where all the links got taken down.

On being a nice link partner:
1. Watch the way you word things so they don’t come across rude. Always be polite!

2. Don’t let your link be “out of sight, out of mind”. Reply to emails in a timely manner. The person on the other end will appreciate knowing that they are important to you, and if you are good at a fast reply you have a better chance of getting the link accepted.

3. Learn to be good at accepting criticism of your site or methods of trading. If someone emails you about exchanging links and they are rude, just either don’t email them back or email them and kindly thank them for their consideration and let them know that you will trade with them in the future if they are ever interested.

Margo’s advice

Margo completed a whopping 143 reciprocal, triangle and parallel link trades last month. She had a 41% conversion rate on on reciprocal trades and 25% on triangles.

Having a tool like LavaLinx to simply cut and paste makes it very easy and saves a lot of time.

Having dynamic sending pages also makes it easy, because I can create a trade and immediately submit it! I know the link is on the page and the trade partner can see their link is up ! I don’t have to keep some kind of list to go back and check with partner b to see if their link has been installed yet, so I can finally ask for a link exchange.

Always respond politely, and usually briefly, to webmasters seeking link partners if you want to keep their business. You never know who may have more sites to trade with, and they will offer them if they like working with you and they like the way their link looks on your pages.

Follow their lead in emails-if they are super friendly, be friendly back, if they are more formal, follow suit.

Check any possible site-some stick within their own specialty, but many have specific pages dedicated to other subjects of interest to their customers.

Marci’s advice

Marci completed 113 reciprocal, triangle and parallel link exchanges last month. She had a 40% conversion rate on reciprocals and 20% on triangle and parallel trades. All trades were made with relevant websites with SEO value.

Marci has also begun work on her own website card customize, and looks forward to success on that site.

Advice for link trading:

1. Everytime you come across a potential link partner, check the cheating tactics (robots.txt, nofollows, noindex, iframe, frameset) and check to make sure the page is indexed in Google before proposing a link exchange.
2. Keep URL’s as bookmarks of previous link partners, then go to their partners’ sites and ask for exchanges with them as well.
3. Any follow-up email with the webmaster or link manager, try to use proper vocabulary and make sure to be nice, even if they weren’t very nice to begin with.
4. Try to be honest and up-front with anyone you’re doing a link trade with (example: letting them know your company is honest and will never try to cheat them out of the exchange).
5. Thank them for their time and consideration.
6. If they don’t understand something, take the time to write it out to help explain things better, and ask if they still feel confused.
7. Try to place their link on a relevant page within your site (we’ve had great success lately within our blog posts) so they will have the best benefit out of the exchange as well.

LavaLinx will no longer be providing Page Rank as part of its trading functionality. We feel that Google’s ability to give a quality score to a web page has diminished to the point that it is no longer of value to our users. Although there are still a fair number of webmasters that look to Page Rank as a measurement of a valuing a web page, we decided that supporting a flawed system is not in the best interest of webmasters seeking successful link trading. Successful link trading should be focused on a cached, content page that is relevant and user-friendly.

We are looking into other services that determine the value of a web page and will implement one that best serves this purpose.

If you want your link trade efforts to really work well, stop putting your links in links pages and link directories. Why? Because search engines are making an obvious effort to devalue lists of outbound links on pages. This may stem in part from the search engines crack down on paid links, but they may also be looking for aggressive link traders as well.

LavaLinx does not create link pages or link directories. What we recommend is that our users use content pages and blog posts as Sending Pages. We then recommend that only relevant outbound links are placed on each page. This creates a scenario that is good for the user. They can read whatever the post or content page is about and then be able to visit sites relevant to that content. Google’s Adsense works on the same principal.

Ok, so what is a Sending Page?

A Sending Page is any page that points links to another site. In LavaLinx you can tag as many pages as you want as Sending Pages. As recommended above, Sending pages should be content pages or blog posts. We currently are working towards a plugin for Wordpress that will dynamically create a Sending Page each time a post is selected for such.

Sending Pages can be either static or dynamic.

Dynamic sending pages

These pages require a small snippet of code to be placed on each sending page. It also requires one file to be placed in the root area of your site. It currenly only works on PHP pages, but will soon be available in other formats. The code is generated server side and we purposely left any comment tags off so there are no patterns left for search engines to see.

The great advantage of setting up dynamic sending pages is that whenever you make a link trade, with any site in the internal network, the link of the site you’re trading with is automatically placed on your sending page. This means that link trading will be just making decisions not messing with html or FTP.

Static sending pages

Some site may not have PHP, or the webmaster may choose to have static pages. This just means that when link trades are made the webmaster will need to update his sending pages manually.

Ok, so what is a Receiving Page?

Receiving Pages in LavaLinx are pages that links are pointed to. The most common Receiving Page would be a site’s home page. With LavaLinx you can have as many Receiving Pages as you want. They don’t have to be home pages. This will allow you to get a number of links pointing to pages deep in your site. You can also have as many different keywords point to the same Receiving Page as you want. Doing this is important because it allows you to optimize for multiple targeted keywords, it makes your backlinks appear more diverse and it gives you control over the copy surrounding those links.

For instance let’s say I have a design site and I’m going after design keywords. I may set up my Receiving pages like this:
Receiving Page 1: URL: www.example-design-site.com
Link Description: We provide the best logo design on the internet.

Receiving Page 2: URL: www.example-design-site.com
Link Description: We are so confident with our web design services that we provide a 100% money-back guarantee on all design work.

Receiving Page 3: URL www.example-design-site.com/design-blog/
Link Description: Are you looking for design advice? Visit our design blog for advice, tips and how tos.

Notice that all link descriptions are contextually placed links. We recommend contextually placed links on all link trades.

Old-school link trading methods are not going to cut it moving forward in SEO. If you want to see a dramatic increase in your rankings, for your link trading efforts, incorporate the methods above.

We just recently rolled out a number of improvements to the LavaLinx system.

1. On Receiving pages you can see how many backlinks are pointed to each page.

2. On Sending pages you can now see how many links are pointing to other sites. This is really helpful when deciding which pages you’d like to post links on.

3. When creating link trades with the Link Wizard you can now see the number of links on all the Sending pages.

4. You can now delete internal trades if needed. In a dynamic trade scenario both links will be automatically removed. If one trader has a static Sending page they will be notified via an email of the trade deletion.

5. System pages were revamped to be more user-friendly.

In the works

1. Multiple user trade reports for Business accounts

2. Personalized emails for External Trades.

Some of the topics covered in this podcast are listed below.

A few link trading basics

1. Search Engines rank pages not websites.
2. Relevant link trading does work and will always work because it’s good for your users.
3. You may not have control over who links to you, but you do have control over who you link to. Let’s face it when you place links on your site to other sites you are recommending these sites. Make sure you place them on a relevant page and make sure they are worthy of linking to. I think that Search engines do take into account who you link to and that your site will gain authority by linking to sites the help the user.
4. Avoid placing links in big lists on a links pages, or making a “links” directory.
5. Don’t try and cheat on links. The experienced SEO will see it in a second, drop your link and keep you from trading with all the sites that they are working on. So you’ll lose way more than you’d ever gain.
6. You can also trade image ads and use alt tags to diversify your backlink portfolio.

Emailing link trade requests

1. Send personalized emails. If you can find a name use it. You can also include their domain in the subject line.
2. It is a common courtesy to place their link on your site first, although I’m seeing less and less of this.
3. Don’t send emails that say you’ve just deleted their link or something like that when you’ve never really traded with them. With Lavalinx I know all the sites that I’ve traded with and I can easily search them. Yes this method gets my attention, but then it just annoys me when I find out that I’ve never traded with them and they’re just using it as a hook to get a better open rate.

Pages that links are placed on

1. Ideally you’ll want your link on a content page or blog post with your links placed contextually within relevant content.
2. The page needs to be indexed and cached in Google.
3. Don’t worry about Page Rank. Too many webmaster get caught in this trap.
4. The page should be related to the page on your site that the link is pointed to.
5. Make sure no link cheating methods are being used, for instance:

a. nofollows in links or in the meta tags
b. javascript links or redirects
c. links in frames
d. links in iframes
e. robots.txt disallowing the page your link is placed on.
f. Some pages even with Page Rank may not be indexed.

Your anchor and link description

1. In your anchor text use the keywords that user would use to search for your service or products in the search engines.
2. If possible, place your anchor text contextually within your description
3. Diversify your anchor text backlinks. For example if your site is about online education use online education, online degrees, online classes, online schools etc in your anchor text
4. have your links point to more than your homepage. Remember Search Engines rank pages not websites.

 

 Link trading that works [8:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download