Link Exchanges

One of the most valuable options available for an affiliate starting a new website is link exchanges, and the best thing is that it is free. 100% completely free. All it requires is a little work.

Let me at first clarify that link exchanges won’t directly bring you visitors to the website. Sure, someone may see your “Build a poker bankroll - for free!” description, and be enticed enough to click, but for the majority of link exchanges that you will be doing, it is highly unlikely. Instead of directly bringing visitors to your website, we will be utilizing link exchanges to get higher search engine rankings. No-one knows for sure how the Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. algorythms actually work, however there are a few tried and proven methods that will work time after time, and it’s a case of breaking it down as simple as possible.

Let’s say you run an electronic store in New York. It’s a great store, has a lot of information, very well designed, however people just aren’t coming to the store. To make matters worse, when people look in tourist brochures or other city guides for information on where to shop for electronics, your site isn’t even listed. Your store is of course your website, and the tourist brochures and guides are the search engines, which help guide people to the websites that they feel will suit a users needs.

Now, let’s say you somehow get mentioned on Fox News, or on a television show about electronics. Suddenly, the people who write the tourist brochures are thinking “hey wait, who is this guy, we have to check out that store and see if it’s going to be worthy of a listing in our guides”. They’re also thinking “Wow, Fox News, a respected television broadcast(well, you know what I mean) mentioned them, they have to be good.” Conversely, if a cable access show mentions your electronics store, it’s not going to get much of a reaction because hey, it’s a cable access show.

This is how link exchanges work. When you have other websites linking to you, search engines take notice. Think about it; if you have two pages exactly the same, same exact content and everything else, but one has 1000 webpages linking to it while another only has 20, which page will the search engines see as the more important? Obviously, the one with 1000 links.

This is also where Google PageRank, hereafter referred to as PR, comes into play. So the friendly GoogleBot is analyzing your site; it checks out all the content, and then it decides to see what other websites link to you. It finds 30 links with a PR of 0. What does that mean? To go back to the electronic store analogy, it means that you have people on the street, newcomers to the city whose opinions are a dime a dozen, saying that they like your store. Now, if you have 30 links where the sites have PR, generally 2 and higher, now Google is thinking “Hey, these websites that have been around a long time are recommending this site; It must be good.” and this can give you a boost up the rankings, and conversely help you get that crucial pagerank, or out of the Google Sandbox.

You really should try this out for yourself. Get three webpages, all with duplicate content, nothing different about any webpage. Submit all three to the search engines. Then, have one site with no links toward it at all. Have another site with 20 link exchanges back to it from PR0 sites. Now with the last site, try and get some links with websites with PR. 5-10 should be enough, and I’m always willing to help experimenters, so you can e-mail me at Dan@DealerDanGaming.com and I’ll be happy to put those link exchanges on my sites with PR. Once this is done, keep note of the sites and their search engine rankings, and you’ll see that the website with the PR links will be #1, the one with 20 links with no PR will be #2, and the other site….well, it may as well not even exist, because nobody is going to be looking at it. Why should they? The search engines don’t think it’s worthy, and that’s what users trust the most.

Now, how do you get these link exchanges? It’s fairly simple. Find some friends, some fellow poker affiliates, visit forums that encourage link exchanges like Poker
Affiliate World and Casino Affiliate Programs and try and get links there. Try and do homepage for homepage links, because it’s at the footer of your site where people generally won’t look, and it will help dramatically with the search engines. “This website doesn’t just have a link on there, it’s on the front page!”. Also set up a links page so your homepage won’t be too crowded. Try to limit homepage footers to 20 or less. Also, be sure to sign up as a Poker.com affiliate. Even if you don’t want to promote their product, they offer link exchanges with other affiliates for poker.com, which can also work in your favour. For example, a search engine finds two PR0 links to your site; one is on a webpage that collects recipes, the other is on another gambling website. Seeing that related content also provides legitimacy to your website, as the search engines see that sites similar to yours are recommending yours.

Now, what do you do when you get these link exchanges set up? You usually have to provide the URL of the website, the title of the website, and sometimes a description. Descriptions can sometimes help, however the thing you should be most concerned about is the title of your website, or rather the title of the link that will bring people to your website. For example, let’s say I ran a site called http://www.123abcpoker-room-reviews.com. Not a pretty domain, right? Now let’s say the link on other websites looks like 123abcpoker-room-reviews. This is a common mistake I see by so many people. They think that all they need to think about is getting a link, and the rest takes care of itself.

WRONG.

Let’s change that anchor text to…oh, I don’t know, Poker Room Reviews. Short and sweet, right? Looks a lot more clean? But even more important, it means that when search engines see this link, they see the phrase Poker Room Reviews and think to themself; “Hey, we have 200 websites saying this is the site to go to for Poker Room Reviews. That means it must be a very good place to go for anyone searching for Poker Room Reviews.” and this will increase your rankings just for that keyword phrase.

The description of the link is not very important. Some search engines take it into consideration, some don’t; it also depends how the webmasters link script is set up. So just keep it simple. If we went with Poker Room Reviews then I’d be looking at a description that stated: “Party Poker Review, Full Tilt Poker Review, True Poker Review, Poker.com Review and many more!”. It may help with keywords like “Party Poker Review”, and there’s also the slim chance that someone searches “Party Poker Review”, finds that webpage with your link on it, and gets to your site that way.

If you ever see this website linked on forums or webpages it is never listed as Poker Affiliate Bible. It is always listed as Poker Affiliate Guide, as that is the term most commonly searched by users like yourself. There is a free resource that you can use for this, which is the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, however if you are serious about your website, I highly recommend using Wordtracker to find out what keywords to target. This isn’t just for link exchanges, it’s for complete search engine optimization for your site, and they even have a free trial.

So take some time; hell, take a whole day, and just work on link exchanges. Posting on forums, e-mailing people, build up a lot of links. However, don’t go crazy. Maybe stop yourself at 50 links, then the next week get another 50 exchanges going. This way, the search engines look at it and say “Well, he didn’t get 1000 links in a week then nothing so he’s not a one-hit wonder; he’s getting links weekly and on a regular basis, so he must be doing something right.”

And by getting link exchanges, you are.