Quality link exchange programmes play an important role in achieving high page ranks for websites. However, most of us are not familiar with how search engines rate the websites. The result for quality link exchange is perceived when visitors search for particular products or services and your site comes up (only when you are providing those services or products).

Search engines look for genuine links belonging to sites that are similar to your objectives. They use various strategies to rate websites. Understanding these strategies before proceeding for link exchange will direct your efforts on right path.

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your website. The only reason you get these incoming links is because these websites consider your website important enough to link to.

Reciprocal linking is the oldest form of link exchange strategy which has undergone modification to keep up with the changing trends of the search engine. In this link exchange program you contact the webmaster of the site that matches your website profile and ask them to link to your site. However place their link on your website before asking them to place their link on your website. When you contact them give them the exact detail of where their link is placed so they know that you link exchange request is genuine.

There are several strategies for carrying out reciprocal link exchange

1. Build a content rich site with good keywords. This increase you chances of getting a reciprocal link exchange request from your other relevant websites.
2. List you site on Yahoo. Do the research and find the most relevant category and link your site on it. Linking on Yahoo will cost you but it will be worth the effort.
3. Short list search engines and directories that are suitable to your website and start linking to them.
4. Create resources page on your site and establish at least 45 -50 related but non-competing, good quality content sites so that you get a good page rank for that particular page. Download the Google bar so as to be able to know the PR of the websites.

Content writing and submission to good article sites is another excellent way of enhancing your sites link popularity. Write good genuine, original and relevant content and submit them on sites like Ezine Articles, Sitepoint, etc. You can also place tutorials, eBooks on your website.

Few of the link popularity strategies have been discussed in this article.

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