Does link Exchange help with SEO?
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by: BrentSweet
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Word Count: 1086
I have researched SEO for years. I have just tried over and over to build one site that I was proud of where I am in Google's index. I studied SEO from the time the internet started. The gurus were saying at that time it is all about your Meta Tags. I looked at my competition, did good keyword density, and made my meta tags better. I figured I would easily outrank the competition. After months of waiting I saw no results. The best part was some of these sites who were reputable corporations had keywords like XXX and Nudity. They did this to try to capture people searching for those terms, though they were unrelated and probably didn't convert well, they were free people viewing your website. Even after nearly duplicating sites, I never improved my rankings.
My next feeling was that it must have been the size of the site that had to do with the ranking. I had a problem though in that I would not be able to build large sites because there really wasn't much content on a subject. Every number one site seemed to have a ton of indexed pages. Then I cam across Traffic Booster Pro. This is a program that takes RSS feeds, randomized them and creates a ton of highly optimized pages. Within days I saw results. I was ranked number 60 for a very competitive keyword. I was so excited, I had finally figured it out. Google crawled several times a day. I had the bigger site. This program built all those pages I needed, and redirected each user to my homepage. I got a major increase in traffic for a period of time, but one day because Google crawled so much it crashed my entire data center. Then I noticed my rankings fell completely off Google. I figured once the data center was fixed and I slowed Google's crawl rate on my site my rankings would return. Big mistake, Google had penalized my site. My site doesn't even rank number 1 for the made up keyword in my domain now, all because of this program.
I then went on to exchange links. I bought programs like SEO elite, which I do recommend for anybody to use, but not for this purpose. More on that program later. I also joined Linkmarket.net. I exchanged links like wild fire, making sure that my anchor text changed, following all the Guru's advice. They claimed this is how they got their rankings. Bull, exchanging links is absolutely worthless. After doing this for a month, I went to see if the Guru's were still offering link exchanges on their sites, if they had partner directories. Yeah right, there was no directories. They had already realized this was an ineffective strategy. Now links do help, search on Google for click here. Adobe ranks #1 and they don't even have click here text on the page.
The answer to the question is no you should not exchange any links. The two ways to get your site links that impact your rankings is to share information like I do and link bait. The article that you are reading is also helping my rankings. I just write about my experience and knowledge, then distribute it to webmasters who want to constant update their content to get indexed several times a day. I do this several times a day with several topics that have to do with my sites. That is how I get links to my site, without exchanging them. I exchange information for one way links.
Like I said two ways of getting links without exchanging. Link bait and content sharing. Link bait is like the ad that Burger King did on the internet with their chicken website. It was a guy dressed up in a chicken suit dancing around and doing silly things. People linked to it in the masses and ranked Burger King number one for the word chicken. The problem with link bait is that you have to be extremely creative to make something people want to naturally link to. If you aren't you can hire someone to do it for you for a pretty penny. It is possible to get these amounts of links easier.
Content sharing is what this is. I am writing an article to inform people. This article, if people like it, will be published on several websites for their users to read. A SEO website trying to provide some free advice may post this article as part of their website content. This benefits the webmaster because adding content frequently gets Search Engines to visit more. The way this can help rankings is if you want to make a change to your site, it takes no time for Google to reflect the change. The catch is to use my content they have to use my resource box. My resource box talks about me and gives a link to my site that I want. So I submit this to a bunch of free content directories where webmasters go to find it. When they find it they can publish it, and then I get links. The best part is even if no webmaster out their publishes my articles, the content directories still link to me. I don't link to anybody on my site, I do still have meta tags, though I don't feel they are very important, and my site has 3 landing pages that are indexed.
In conclusion, it is not a big site, nor meta tags, nor code for that matter. The best rankings I have received are from writing articles just like these and distributing. Plus it is so much fun to share information with the world through these articles. It is also manual, Google likes to punish folks inflating their results with quick fix scams like getting 1000 links in a day and such. These articles though, Google knows I took the time to write it, so it weights it very nice when it ranks my site. Like I said my basic job for promotion is to share free information, and then link it to my site.
About the Author
Brent Sweet is the President of Article Submission Express. This is a company that can help you distribute articles such as this through the internet for instant links to your site, and improved rankings. Click here to read more about Article Submissions.
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