Link Exchanges

Popular websites tend to be regiestered in reputable directories such as Yahoo Directory or Yell. To determine if a site is really worthy of a link you should evluate their content. In addition you may want to do a backlink check and see how they aquired their inbound links.

It is good from a web optimisation point of view to link to other websites that are relevant to yours if they link back but only if done legitimately. Stay away from credit, loans, medicine, gambling and adult content sites as they will damage your pagerank score and your credibility. If the site you are linking to has nothing to do with the topic of your site and no relation to what may interest your viewers then you should not link to them. And also, if you link to many irrelevant and low quality websites, then it will be unlikely that other good quality websites will want to link to yours. If you send junk link exchange requests they will usually be deleted as spam. You should also delete any email that looks similar to the following...

Dear Webmaster,

We are marketing *** and we feel that reciprocating it with your site should help increase traffic and also search engine rankings to a certain extent.

We have placed a link to your website over here:-

***
Kindly check the link details and if you need any modifications, please let me know.

I would also appreciate if you link back to my website using this code:-
Plavix is used to prevent blood clots which causes arteries to harden or become narrow. It is an anti-platelet agent used to reduce the risk of heart attacks. 
I will keep the link active for 7 days. If you are not interested in linking back then we will remove this reciprocal link (to be fair to our other link partners).

Thanks.

The above invitation has the following hallmarks of spam...

• They are mass emails not addressed properly to the site owner but rather taking parts generated from an automated program.
• It requests a link to an offshore drug store
• It provides a link to you from an obscure website which has been banned from google with no pagerank
• The quality of their website is very poor
• They pressure you with a time limit

The best link exchanges are performed with sites whom you already do business with. In this way, it benefits both your business dealings with them and can help with page rank and keyword rankings.