Effective exchanges

[mhdoc]

I have not done link exchanges with my sites. I probably need to, so I have been following discussions at DP and elsewhere about how it should be done.

My conclusion is that I should be looking for links from sites which are closely related topic wise to my site and I should request the link be my anchor text embedded smoothly into the content of a single page. I may even want the link to point to a new page I place on my site that specifically relates to the page from which the link is coming.

[PlanetAndrea]

i've just started doing this, we'll see how it works, would you be interested? most of my sites are cooking/travel

[mhdoc]

I begin to see why this is not a popular process; it's going to take time and effort :)

The only site I have which could reasonably connect with one of yours, after some work, is www.bungalow-style.info. I would need to add pages describing the layout and appliances to be found in the "modern" kitchen of 1920. I could then link to your site where you might have "scratch" recipies and conversions and substitutions for old style ingredients. (my grandmother thought goose grease was wonderful for pie crusts :)

Your readers might enjoy seeing the "modern" kitchen in which they would have prepared these recipies.

From my side that would amount to a couple full days of work to build the framework for a single link. It's probably worth considering because it would be the kind of link that would actually send/receive targeted traffic.

[jason]

Ultimately, I think your time is best spent creating content that will attract one-way links from other sites. Reciprocal linking is very easy to detect and all you have to do is read many of the posts on SEM blogs or listen to people like Matt Cutts' comments at recent webmaster/search conferences.

[FrogEngine]

Agree completely. Come up with unique story lines or be the first to pick up something new. Bloggers like showing off new things and if you have something written up that others are not aware of yet, you're bound to get VBLs (voluntary back links)