As previously discussed in another post, inbound and outbound links do have their merits as far as page rank goes because the algorithms the search engines use are partially dependent on the relevancy and quantity of links.

However, that being said, the links themselves have very little or no relevancy as far as being a direct, influential advantage to your website or business in terms of gaining customers and sales.

So, you don’t want to be spending much time “minding” something like this. Yet, having a link exchange is both highly advisable and recommended.

What to do? What’s involved? Sniff… sniff… do I detect a hint of drudgery in the air? Not necessarily.

There are two ways to handle this.

One way is to maintain a manual link exchange.

This involves creating pages on your website for each category you want in your link exchange, adding a form so people can apply manually, checking each site that applies to your link exchange for:

• website theme relevancy
• to see whether they actually put a link back to your site or just said they did
• to see whether they put your link on the same site they asked you to link to (or not) AKA 3 way linking
• checking periodically for dead links which can involve hours of time finding your link buried several pages deep somewhere on their site

Now, you are wondering why you would need to break your link exchange down into categories?

Because in Google Land, a link exchange with categories suggests an organized listing by themed content, as opposed to one long jumbled listing of links which not so vaguely resembles a link farm (a MAJOR NO-NO).

If your link exchange is small you can just divide one page into several categories until it grows.

Why would you feel compelled to do all the checking as noted above?

You want to check that the website applying to your link exchange is really the website they say it is and that it fits in with your link exchange theme. You want to discourage any 3 way linking which is generally something like this:

I have websites A and B. You have website C. A has no relevance to yours (C), and B has no page rank. I link yours (C) to mine (A) burying your link somewhere on page 31 of all my non-relevant links, while you out of the goodness of your heart are an absolute dear and you are promoting my never to be found website (B) in your link exchange. What’s wrong with this? Your website (C) is promoting my website B while I am doing absolutely nothing for you on my website A. It’s basically one way, with you doing all the work. You want to stay away from that. You want to have your website linked to my website which both have relevance to each other, nice direct links, that’s that end of story. Everybody benefits.

And, you want to check that each website is really linking back to you, otherwise, again, this becomes one-sided with you having a bunch of links and the other party or parties having nothing out there helping you. This can actually hurt you and lower your value (page rank) with having a bunch of dead or non-relevant links in your link exchange.

Now in case you have not noticed all of this is ridiculously time consuming, and apparently it’s slipped your mind that time is money. OOOOOOPS. Plus by now you have a migraine headache just thinking about link exchanging.

What to do about all of this cyber political handshaking that we call link exchanging?

First of all you DO NEED a link exchange ~ for page rank, for possible networking and for a small degree of search engine positioning (which despite being a small degree we Internet merchants cannot afford to ignore any small part!)

Second of all you need this process to be automated, efficient and affordable.

Here’s what I found works for me.

A self hosted top site script.

That’s what I use for my link exchange at my retail website, Jewelry Collectibles. I’ll be installing one for my webdesign site here, and for my wedding and event planning website as well, which only just launched and is in it’s infancy.

My link exchange is hosted on my server, so that all traffic to and from benefits my overall website stats, site traffic and ultimately search engine positioning. Plus the page rank of my link exchange contributes to the overall page rank of my website.

It’s heavily customized with some more customization on the way (we never stop tweaking do we!) so that I can feature websites or insert advertising where I like.

I can create custom pages if I want to run a contest, let’s say, and feature a website that belongs from time to time. Or just spell out the join rules clearly.

It’s no muss, no fuss. You signup, either with or without a banner and I get notified. I review your website, approve you, (or, gasp, disapprove you). Assuming I approve you, you then receive the join code in your email to put on your website, blog, Squidoo lens, MySpace page, Kaboodle profile, Stylehive profile, etc. etc. As long as that code is on your site, you stay listed in my link exchange. Drop the code, you get dropped from the link exchange faster than a hot potato.

Oh, how much time did I spend on your listing? Perhaps a minute to review your site and then to click “approve”.

How fast was I able to get back to attending to my own business? Virtually immediately.

If this sort of “work smarter not harder” approach appeals to you, and you need a link exchange at your website or blog, click here to find out more.

Reap the benefits and get back to minding YOUR business!

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New Jersey Web Design by Jewelry Collectibles Design, conveniently located in Hackensack, Bergen County New Jersey, is owned and operated by Maureen McCullough. In business since 2000 as a freelance professional and now also an eBay Stores Certified Designer. Our clients receive professional, creative designs put together outside of the typical corporate genre, fully carrying your small business identity through your entire venue ~ website, blog, forum, links management, eBay store and other online venues. Happy to be a woman owned small business.