What is the best way to market a link exchange program? Currently we are trading free Sponsored Listings in our search results for reciprocal links. We are mainly trying to trade with real estate related websites, but all are good. Does anyone have any input?

Thanks

There are lots of places like linksmanager.com that can help you with this. Do a google search and you'll find a ton of results.

When first starting out, try posting link exchange requests in various webmaster forums. For example, we offer a "Traffic Exchange" forum and so do other forums such as www.webhostingtalk.com - also, check out the threads that are already there - it's a great way to make contacts in your industry.

Something else to do is directly below your listing of partners, add a link called "List Your Site Here for Free" or something of that nature - and link it to a page on your site saying that you offer free link swaps.

Believe me, word does get around. Especially on a niche site such as real estate, the webmasters of all the popular real estate forums eventually get to know (or at least know of) each other. By swapping links with a few of these sites, others will start to see "this site is popping up all over the place" and check you out too.

I'm not a fan of linksmanager.com software. But what I do likeir sister site, linkpartners.com - it lets you do a search of various websites that all have link pages just like you, and are willing to do link trades with other sites.

In fact, there is an entire category of real estate websites that are also looking for link partners: http://linkpartners.com/lparts96.html

I have a bunch of different websites like http://www.seekshopping.com and the best link exchange web site I came across was Spocka.com (http://www.spocka.com).

It's built on the osCommerce platform and they allow you to pound their server and get link exchanges quickly. For example, I can go to the view all links page and request a link with every member of the site with the push of one button. That's awesome!

So, Spocka.com is my recommendation as part of a link exchange campaign.

I suggest you try out LinkMetro.com I used it recently quite extensively to get a site on a competitive territory like "mortgages" to the first page of Google and MSN.

We just find other related sites to exchange with.

http://Conway.inside-real-estate.com/

A good contact letter is the biggest improvement you can make to your Link Exchange Program.

Check out http://building-links.blogspot.com/ for tips, tools and examples.


Regards,

Linkbuilder

Reciprocal link with similar in theme to your site can bring good results just avoid spam sites.

There are a few professional tools that help you find the best potential link partners.

My favorite tool scans the link partners of a competitors site... I review someone with a top ranking and a top pagerank for the industry - enter it into my nifty program - and away it goes.

This tool visits every link pointing to my competitor and reads every page. It records the title, description, and keyword tags, calculates the keyword density on the page, the number of links to that page, and the number of links out from that page - as well as it's pagerank and alexa ranking.

All of the results are exported to excel, where I instantly sort a list of 100's to find the very most valuable links that are pointing to my competitor.

In 20 minutes, I can find a handful actively linking sites with links pages that have a healthy pagerank, lots of links in, few links out - AND that focus exactly on the keyword phrases I'm targeting!

Pure Gold.

Linkbuilder