Link exchanging between websites. Things you must know.

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Ok I read another article here by another member who had read a book about link exchanging. They said that exchanging links with other sites is good for your web site and left it at that. That is only partially accurate. First of all it only helps if you get a link from a website that is in the same internet category as your site. For instance if you sell auto parts, you need to only exchange links with other sites that deal with cars or parts. They can be forums, ecommerce sites, or anything automotive related. Links from sites that are not in your category do you absolutely no good at all! Atleast not with Google and Yahoo. Secondly these must be text links not banners. Only text links will count towards what is called a 'Back link'. Linking to other sites do not help your site, It helps the site you are linking to. A 'Back link' is where a site links 'Back' to your site. These links help your pagerank. Attention! When I say pagerank I do not mean Google Pagerank. Unless you are a professional SEO, ignore the Pagerank bar on your Google toolbar, it means nothing and that is straight from coders who work for Google. Even Googles toolbar does not accurately show your current Google pagerank. Pagerank is different for each search engine. Now, getting your pagerank up will only help your keyword rankings if you have properly optimized your website. I can't tell you how many times I see a small business who has 60 or more keywords in their keyword meta tag and they aren't getting ranked for any of the keywords at all or just a few. In most cases they were being banned from those keywords for spamming. Look it's not like it was 5 years ago. Just knowing how to move text and pictures around on a web page and filling your keywords meta tag with keywords no longer works and in fact you are probably now being penalized for such practices. Google for instance doesn't even look at the keywords meta tag. They use the description meta tag. They pull keywords out of your description then they check to see if those keywords are in your page content. If those keywords are not in your page content you will not be ranked for those keywords. The way you list your keywords in your page content also makes a difference, your header tags help a great deal, and the number of times these keywords appear on your page also matters. It's all about the code now not the text and pictures you have on your site. Web browsers are like critics, they look at your site and make a judgement. They say "is the person who created this site a professional web designer or is this person an amature web designer?". Search engines are trying to 'weed out' the amatures. It sucks... It's not fair to the small business owner but unless there is a law passed regulating such things Google and the other major search engines will continue to make their own rules. What else do they look for? Well they like Style Sheets or CSS. CSS is a way of getting much of the code off your web page and on to a seperate file. Your font tags for instance are one of the most time consuming things for web crawlers to work through on your site. Often by getting your font tags out of the code of your page you can cut your page load time in half or more. So let's say you've got all your code just right, you have CSS, your page content and description meta tag is right, will pagerank help me now? Not necassarily. This is the mistake many site owners are making right now. They have an old website and insted of updating the look of their site they just concentrate on optimization. What happens is, they get their site optimized, they get a good page rank and their web traffic increases. Unfortunately because their site looks like a site that was made 5 years ago many of their visitors will leave the site almost as fast as they found it. Visitors too make a 'First Impression' judgement. If your site looks old they subconciously consider your site to be risky to do business with. If your site looks modern and has the right bells and whistles for your type of site, they will subconciously think, "Hey this site really has it together" and they trust that site more than the former. We call this your 'Bounce Rate' and you are in luck. Google recently added new features to google analytics and one of them is tracking the bounce rate for your website. Your bounce rate means whether people come to your site, stay and look around, or whether they take one look at your site and leave. If you have a high bounce rate that is bad. I would suggest you have an outdated website or your site simply does not make it clear at first glance what the function of your website is. If you sell products make sure your visitors see that right away. Same for any other type of site. Make sure your visitor is able to descern exactly what the function of your site is as soon as they arrive. A good bounce rate is 20% to 30%. If your bounce rate is around 60% which I see all the time, then by getting your pagerank up hasn't helped much because you are only keeping 40% of the visitors you get anyway. Ok that was the good news. If you get optimized, page ranked, and have a modern looking website you should be in good shape. Well that was true just a few months ago. The bad news is Google has once again changed the rules. Just getting a link isn't helping as much with Google and I believe Yahoo is moving this direction also. What they want to see now is called an anchor link. In other words those websites that you worked so hard to get a links from are not helping you like they used to. What Google wants now is that not only is the link a text link but they want to see your keywords in the link. A proper anchor link will look like this if say your site sells baseball caps. "Baseball caps" - All your favorite baseball team caps! 'Baseball caps' would be the link and the rest is just an extra description so that you can make it clear that you are selling caps and your site is not just a forum for talking about baseball caps. Everything after 'Baseball caps' doesn't matter to Google. This not only helps your page rank but it helps you get a higher search engine ranking for the keyword 'Baseball Caps'. This can be very helpful if you've had trouble in the past getting ranked for certain important keywords. Now the big mistake people will make is to put more than one keyword phrase in the link like 'New York Yankee Baseball caps'. That will not help you get higher search engine rankings for 'Baseball caps'. It will only help you get a higher ranking if someone types in the entire phrase 'New York Yankee Baseball caps'. There are 100's of things you must do now to get better search engine rankings most of which I have not covered here. You really must turn to a professional if you want your site to be successful. It's just too complicated to try to optimize your own website. Even if you pay a professional web designer to build you a really nice looking site if they don't know SEO what you will have is a nice looking site that gets no traffic. I hope this helps. If you have any questions feel free to ask.