What is Article Marketing? Article Marketing is the process of writing a 400-1000 word article that is keyword rich and yet not too spam my. The power of article marketing is in the About the Author section. In this section you may include up to 2 links to your website, minister, bog, etc. These links may have a keyword rich anchor and are do Follow (most of the time). Each domain that you are promoting should have about 40 or more articles (if you are trying to get the highest seeps possible. 40 articles is a lot of writing no matter how yaw swing it, but I have found that reviewing a product is probably the easiest way to go. Imagine that you write an article and it gets submitted to 500 article directories (some with high PR and link juice). Those 500 sites now link to you with a very relevant keyword anchor. This brings you valuable free traffic in two ways: the more backlines you have, the higher your site will position on the search engines (seeps).A quality article brings you the author visits to your bog from the links included in the about the author section or go to 
If you are serious about Article Marketing you will want to have your articles submitted automatically to article directories for you (time is money). I have used three services for this. The first (and best) would be Article Marketer. Article Marketer is a subscription based service (it costs $50.00 per Quarter or $160 per year) for unlimited article submissions to 5000 or more article directories. Article Marketer reviews your article in 1 or 2 days (other services can take up to 15 days) and informs you of any potential issues with your article before distribution begins. Article Marketer will not distribute your article until it meets certain criteria. Article Marketer provides you with distribution and exposure reports as well, which are really nice because you want to see what you are paying for frankly. Directories and automatically submit your article to them automatically for 2 dollars per article you can visit
Snare takes about 5 days to review your article and is not as thorough as Article Marketer. As long as your article has 400 words they will push it out. That may sound good, but it is not. Article Directories are fraught with many rules and it is really important that your article be universally acceptable for maximum exposure. Finally, the third Article Submission tool is Digammas Article Submitter. This is a free article submission tool that submits your article to hundreds of low pr or ranking article directories. Digammas Article Submitter is a semi automatic process and requires several manual steps, but it is a free solution. You bet it is! Nothing is better than getting one way backlines to your site with relevant link anchors. These one way text links can rocket your site towards the top of the SERPS, especially if your topic or niche is under one million results.

www.press-release-profits.com
www.perfect-ghost-writer.com

After proving that link exchanges really work to help search engine rankings, I was bombarded with requests asking about my successful method for getting reciprocal links. Instead of answering each person individually, I decided to put up an article that will help everyone who is strugling with getting responses to their link request emails.

And that’s the big problem with link exchange requests, isn’t it? They are often ignored. If you have the words “link exchange” or “reciprocal link” or anything like that in the email subject, the email will be unceromoniously deleted by 95% of webmasters. The other 5% probably aren’t worth trading links with.

Why is that? It’s because thousands of webmasters are using automated tools to crank out the link request emails, trying to get links to junk sites that have little real content and even less value. Because of this, webmasters have been conditioned to ignore link request emails.

First, Don’t Ask For Link: Pay A Compliment and Give a Link

I solved this problem by not asking for a link in my “link request” email. In fact, I don’t even mention a link at all!

Does it seem counter-intuative to not ask for a link request in my emails which are designed to get a link to my site? It probably does. But if you ask for a link, you’ll just get your email deleted, so you need to take an alternate route.

My subject line is usually something like:

“I’d love to add your site to my directory!”

Then, in the message body, I tell the webmaster what I like about their site and ask them to add their site to my directory. (Note: You should always pay the webmaster a personalized compliment so that they know your request wasn’t cranked out by a machine.)

Wouldn’t you be much more motivated to open up an email that says the person would love to add your site to their directory than to open one that says “Link exchange request” or something impersonal like that?

They Add Their Link To Your Directory, And Then …

Once the webmaster adds their link to your directory, only then do you ask for a link back. Once they’ve already been given a generous link by you, most often those same webmasters will return the favor. In fact, I generally see about a 70% reciprocal link rate.

For the other 30%, they are still a valuable addition to my directory, so I keep them in there, but I mark their links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute so I don’t lose any PageRank for a webmaster who won’t return the favor.

Do The Math

In the typical, unproductive scenario, you might send out 100 emails asking for a link back. You might get 10% to open the email at all, and of those who do only 20% actually swap links with you. That’s 100 emails times 10% who open, or 10 people who actually read the email. Of those 10, 20% swap links with you, so you end up with only 2 links. Ouch!

Using my method, I get a solid 50-60% who open the email, followed by 70% who swap links with me. So I end up with 100 times 50%, or 50 email readers, times 70%. So I end up with 35 links. That’s more than 17 times as productive as the clunky old method.

But it still takes work, which is why I recommend using SEO Elite to automate the process of finding and emailing potential link partners.

Have you developed a linking strategy for your site? If you have keep in mind that there are different ways to build backlinks. one of the easiest ways is through a link exchange.

A link exchange is done with a similar site, and both sites place a link to the other. Link exchanges have been penalized by search engines because of heavy spam but there still benefits to doing a link exchange, so don’t be afraid to try.

Inbound one way links are, by far, the best links to get. These links are sometimes difficult to get because there is no exchange. It requires the other web site to link to you without you linking to them. Gaining one way links should rank near the top of your off-page optimization strategy.

You must get noticed to gain one way links. Gaining attention online is not much different from getting attention off-line.

To gain links, you need to provide content that is unique and original to entice other sites to link to you. Adding a blog, or forum is an excellent way to continually add new content to your static site. If you have a static web site it will be much more difficult to gain links.

Applying SEO techniques such as the above can bring great benefits. As an example if you are trying to optimize a site that sells vitamins. The first step would be researching highly ranked competitors. Use the blog or forum of the site you are analyzing to find out what the hot topics are. Typically in these community sites hot topics will draw quite a bit of traffic and comments from readers.

One method of gaining their attention is to look at the topics on their site that are creating the most commotion. When you find the hot topics, do a review of the site on your blog. In your review concentrate on the hot topic, but don’t just talk about their services. Point out what they have missed, or don’t have, keep in mind you want to draw their attention. The key is you’re not trying to advertise for them rather you want to establish yourself as an expert.

Many times your review via a blog will be noticed by the other site. You may need to draw their attention to it, it wont always happen automatically. Think of it as being in a crowd where everyone is talking. If you enter the conversation you must make sure to say something relevant. If you speak up and say something unrelated or meaningless people in the crowd will quickly dismiss you.

Here’s the trick to this technique, when you comment about a site or bring up a controversial point they have to link to you to reply to your review. Remember to position yourself as an expert when you do this. Don’t be rude or obnoxious, but make meaningful comments and reviews and you’re bound to get noticed.

Generally, blogs track links back to the blog, so most likely if they feel something needs to be answered, they will.

After you complete your review, leave a comment on the other site, don’t just leave it to fate for them to find it. Excerpt just enough of your review to get attention and peak their interest. This serves two purposes, primarily it will establish you as an expert, second their readers will follow the link from the comment to your site. The key is to do this on popular active sites. You wont benefit if the site is not active with members reading and commenting.

In time you will build links and increase traffic to your site. If you do it right you’ll see the numbers jump in your traffic from other readers visiting your site to get the rest of the story.

The art of getting reciprocal links is being refined, but it is far from dead.

For webmasters who are publishing their first website, reciprocal links are of great importance. Getting one way links is no easy task, and it borders on the impossible for a brand new website that has no page rank.

Whatever can be said about the validity of page rank, it is still important in many ways. It can greatly influence those you would want to get links from.

Getting new websites ranked has to start somewhere, and reciprocal links are part of the equation.

Seven guidelines for getting more reciprocal links

1. Set up a links directory on your website. Call it something besides links or links directory.

2. Decide which categories of links relate to the content of your website and accept only reciprocal links in those categories.

3. Make sure your directory is categorized, and that you limit the number of links per page. A figure well below fifty is preferred.

4. Join a link exchange. With a link exchange all the parties that belong are looking to echange links and this will make it easier and more efficient to get links in the beginning.

5. Make sure you have a link to your links directory on your home page. Many who sign up at reciprocal link exchanges do not. Those exchanging links want to see where their links will reside on your website. If you make it difficult to find, many will just click away.

6. Look at the websites before you agree to exchange links. Avoid sites that are scraped content or made up primarily of rss feeds. Or sites who have one page with a gazillion links on it. Also consider how the site relates to your website. Is it a site you would be proud to have as a link partner? You do get to make the choice.

7. Set up an add url or link to us page on your own website. Spell out your specific guidelines. List types of sites you will not accept. Create a box with your site title(anchor text), description and your url. In your guidelines state that you need them to place your link first and notify you where the reciprocal can be found by email. If your webhost provides mailboxes, dedicate one specifically for this purpose.

Do check your mailbox on a regular basis. Notify those who you’ve accepted as link partners of where you have placed their link.

And lastly, on your link to us page, change the description and anchor text periodically.

Using back links is one of the fastest ways to increase the exposure and the traffic of your website. There really are a number of ways to do it. The first thing to try is link exchanging with relevant sites. This is a free method of gaining back links through it may not be the most effective method as recent times has seen a switch from exchanging links to other methods.

This is because many of the ranking sites that you would want to exchange links with are either going to charge a fee or they are not going to want to exchange links with a site that has a ranking below a certain point. It is simply easier to consider other options at least until you build the ranking you need to exchange with the higher ranked sites.

It really is much faster to submit links to directories. Directories are large repositories of links that are organized based on categories. There are hundreds of these directories and the majority of them are going to contain a number of sites that will be able to share links and provide you with a wealth of exposure that you need in order to be able to promote your website.

You have a couple of options with these directories you can simply submit to them making sure you have the categories for you website correct. This is essential or you can actively submit and then go through the entire directory and exchange links with everyone in your category that is relevant.

You can think of a directory as a phone book. In fact, it was what people used to find websites prior to the current search engines. This means there are literally hundreds of directories, all of which are still active and still used. In fact, there are websites that are dedicated to these directories. In order to receive hundreds of back links you need to submit to them regularly.

There are even software applications that can assist you in making the submission process easy. You will want to do your submissions for back links in batches. Too many submissions in a short period of time will raise a flag with most search engines that may be counter productive. However, out of all the ways there are to submit to directories software applications are probably going to be the easiest and fastest way to get a large number of submissions in a short period of time.

Directories are just one way to make good use of back links for your website and to generate a large number of them in a short period of time. This increases both page ranking and exposure both of which are necessary for generating traffic and pulling customers in.

It should not be the only method you are using to market your website but it is definitely one of the methods that should be incorporated in your internet marketing strategy when you are devising a plan to boost your website ranking and generate traffic.

With any online business, generating traffic to view the products or services you have to offer is essential. Since the World Wide Web is a huge arena, you can bet there is plenty of competition out there. It doesn’t matter how great of an item you have to offer if people don’t find out about it. To get your business the recognition it deserves, it is vital that you understand the various techniques for building links to your site.

If you want to rank well on the search engines, you have to have quality backlinks from other websites. Without quality backlinks to your site, you will not be able to rank well on the search engines. The good news is that there are lots of ways to build links to your site. Some of the ways to building these links are going to cost you money, but some of the most successful ways really won’t cost you anything more than your time.

One of first places you want to start is with submitting your website to the various web directories. There are 100′s of web directories that will give you a free listing for your website. The most important thing to do when submitting your site to web directories is to read the instructions. If you don’t follow the instructions, your listing will likely be denied.

There are also many places on the internet where you can submit articles for free. The articles can be informational in nature but they can’t be a direct advertisement for your business. However, at the bottom of the articles you can add a section that provides information about yourself and a link to your website if they want more information. Article marketing is one of the best ways to get quality one way links to your site.

When it comes to building links to your site, there are a couple of areas you want to pay special attention to.

Be careful with link exchanges. Link exchanging is the process of you placing someone else’s link on your web pages in exchange for them doing the same for you. Be careful of what sites you link to – you don’t want your site to be linking to a bunch of low quality or unethical sites.

Be especially wary of automated link exchange programs. These systems may save you time, but they are frowned upon by the search engines and may cause you problems. Google, Yahoo, and MSN may penalize your site for using automated link exchange programs (often called link farms), or they may even ban your site.

If you decide to engage in link exchanges, be very selective about who you do it with and how many you have. Make sure the ads you do place there aren’t a direct competition to what you have to offer. They should be for a product or service that is related to what you have to offer though. Try to do link exchanges with sites that will link to you from a semi-prominent page on their site.

When building links, be sure that you include your site’s keywords in the anchor text of the link. For example, if your site’s main keywords are buy widgets and blue widgets, you might use the anchor text buy blue widgets.

Don’t get caught up in the process of placing numerous ads for other sites on your own web pages. Not only is it distracting to the customers who visit your site, but it can cost you business. When a visitor clicks a link to somewhere else there is a very high risk that they won’t be returning to yours.

Building links is time consuming, but with hard work and some ingenuity, you can gain good search engine rankings.

Getting back links are the one of the important way to increase the page rank of the sites. Because most search engines

calculating their page rank according to the no of back links and the percentage of keyword density present in the WebPages.

Traffic to your Site

Getting the back links is one of the complex task in SEO. Because most of the back link providers expect the same traffic or

Quality of back links returned to their websites from the receiving sites. This will be the great challenge for beginners who have just started the blogging. In that situation these webmasters should look for the alternate paths for getting back links.

So it was wise to request the back links after getting a reasonable traffic. So adding the url to various directories and

search engines are the foremost task to gain traffic.

Choosing Relevant& Qualified Back link Providers

Choosing the relevant& qualified back links providers, is the another important task for the getting back links.

Because wrongly placed back links will not provide right results.

Getting links from the sites/ blogs which has no enough page rank will not increase the page ranks.

For E.g.

site A has the page rank of 0.And it gets 50 back links from 0 page ranked sites will not increase the page rank. But getting

the links form page rank 4 or more site will surely increases the page rank of the sites. So getting links from high page ranked

sites will provide the expected page rank.

Most of them believes that by putting their comments with their hyperlink will provide the enough page rank. But it was not

Almost true, Most of the links provided through these comment section will not followed by search engine crawlers. So these

links will not considered as valid back links. But by these hyperlink the visitors can navigated to the commenter’s pages.But it

was very few. By checking the properties of the links will provide the clear idea about whether it is crawlable or not.

Don’t put your links where over crowded links are placed .Because the page rank was shared among the links. That results that

pages will provides very small amount of page rank to sites. It just like sharing the apples with no of peoples. If no of

peoples are increased, then every one gets small piece of apple. So try to get links from qualified and less links placed

sites.

The Mistake done by most of the webmasters to get back links are, getting links from exchanging programs. Most of the

exchanging programs are only dedicated to exchange their links to each other. The most of the users participating in these

programs are webmasters and they are not real end users. And another important point is major search engines ignore these kind

of link exchange from crawling .They are constantly improving their crawling techniques to maintain their standard. So getting

thousand links in overnight from these kind of link exchange programs will not give the results in longer run.

Social networking is the one of the famous tool having today to get back links. Participating in these social networking

activities will provides quality and direct links to your site. In most fo the social networking groups users can view and

share their links. These will improve the page rank and drive more traffic.

Article writing is the one of the best way to get valid back links. Article submissions will provide the direct back links to

sites. Today various service providers are available to post your articles and get back links to your site. Writers can put

their signatures on that articles and get back links.

If you’re the least bit serious about promoting your website(s) online then you have probably heard the recent cry that one’s website needs links coming into it. Lot’s of links. And without these many, many links one is the proverbial billboard in the desert waiting to be seen by those thirsty for sustenance.

Well after these several years that I’ve been on the internet I too heard the call and have followed the many internet bandwagons that have rolled into e-town touting the next ‘latest and greatest’ snakeoil software to get one traffic that they won’t believe.

You know the cry… ‘The traffic explosion your favorite web guru gets – and it’ll only cost you $795 to attend this three-day conference to learn how to play with the big boys (and girls) online.’

Sound familiar? To most owning one or several websites it will.

But after being dragged around the reciprocal linking millstone over the last several months in a valiant attempt to obtain many reciprocal link exchanges and closely monitoring all completed link requests I can truthfully say that that job in itself is a bugger to track and stay on top of.

Why?

Because for the most part one has to rely on one common denominator in that equation… people.

I finally realized that this tactic of getting traffic ‘for free’ and having it prove itself as viable was indeed true. Link-exchanges do work. But they ARE work too.

But with me being the type of person who writes with my eyes closed (literally), I was told by a couple of e-friends that I should pursue ‘articles’ more vehemently. I didn’t know what they meant so what I did was find out about a couple of the bigger article directories on the Net and I submitted a couple of my writings to them. And then I promptly forgot about this process because it was extremely labor intensive.

And with me being a relatively lazy fellow at times I ‘moved on’ to other tasks that seemed more to my liking. And ease of use.

But after getting relatively burned out with this link-exchange stuff and dogging real live people to honor link exchange requests after I had ‘nicely’ place an unexpected link to their site on my site, I was tired of this whole process.

~~~~COMMENT~~~~
Yes, I know there are automated processes and software out there that will do this linking stuff for one, but again, I’ve also read how the SE’s are ‘onto’ these tactics and reciprocal links aren’t as effective as they used to be.

But they are still effective, that’s why I still honor the odd link exchange request I get. I just don’t spend all my time doing this anymore.

But getting back on track to the actual subject of this article…
~~END COMMENT~~

Back a couple of months ago, I somehow received an email about a new software program that would do ‘article submissions’ almost automatically.

But let me first digress somewhat and tell you what ‘article submitting’ is.

Article submitting may sound kind of formal and only for ‘writers’, but it isn’t.

Essentially, anytime one writes something of extended length, even a longer webpage, they’ve written an ‘article’.

Think about it. If you have a website that you’ve personally written, then you have written articles related to the subject of your website.

So, if your website is all about the best way to burp babies, then you have a whole bunch of ‘articles’ that you’ve written about parenting, specifically, burping babies.

What you can then do is submit these articles throughout the WWW and get yourself known as a baby burping expert.

But even more importantly, you can take each of the webpages you’ve written on your website and turn it into an ‘article’ – add a link BACK to your site in the footer of the article – and voila! you have written an article and ALSO obtained a link back to your site whenever someone else uses that article.

And all this without having to hassle with e-chasing that non-compliant link partner to honor their link exchange with you.

Sound cool? It is.

Now, like everything else, there is a downside to all this article writing.

It takes time to do.

First you have to have written YOUR OWN articles/webpages. And then you have to personally submit them to any of several hundred article directories floating around in cyberspace.

And of course there is the whole idea of you having the motivation to do this submission stuff too, so let me share a little bit of motivating statistics with you.

Remember how I mentioned earlier about having piddled with submitting a couple of stories/webpages I had written to several of the major article directories? Well, that was about 14 months ago. And remember how I told you that I did this and then promptly forgot about all this article submission stuff?

Well, over those 14 months since I did this, which by the way only took about one hour to do, I now have about 300 STATIC, incoming links to my site from those two articles being posted around the Internet. Yes, 300 incoming, NOT reciprocal, links.

And so what I did was after I received that email from someone touting this article submission software was to do some research on this whole article submission automation software process.

What I came out of this research with was that as of now there are two main article submission software programs that allow one to automate most of the process of doing this sometimes laborious task.

And since it is so repetitive and sometimes painstaking to do manual article submissions I thought that this would be one way to get me back into this process that I think is well suited for the way I like to promote my business online. With words, that is.

After much mental deliberation, and financial detailing, I opted to go for an article submission software that was released during the summer of 2005. Besides it being almost one-third the price of the other main player in this article submittal software e-competition going on, it also appeared to have a lot going for it with a money-back guarantee and a manual and good developer-support.

So I bought it several weeks ago and have been using it everyday to promote several of my websites by submitting ‘articles’ I’ve written to the several hundred article directories included in the automatic submissions this software does for the user.

And to say the least, the results, so far, are extremely impressive.

One little statistic. Remember those two articles I submitted 14 months ago and obtained over 300 incoming links from doing so? Well, I’ve used this software to continue submitting them to other article directories included in the software program.

And now that 300 incoming links number now numbers almost 700. Yes, 700 incoming links from just those two articles. An increase of approximately 400 incoming links, in just five weeks.

To me, those are some GOOD results. Especially without having to chase other humans to reciprocal link with me, building link webpages, tracking linking emails, checking links, buying tracking software, and all that stuff that goes along with the reciprocal linking process.

So, if you’re tired of buying links and chasing other website owners for reciprocal link exchanges, do consider using content you’ve written as a way to get links, and eventually traffic, into your site.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.articlesandauthors.com/ – THE Premier Site for Articles AND Authors

(Authors permission is granted to share this full article with others. Just leave the signature line intact, please.)

Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. Building good quality links will help your website to gain top positioning in search engines There are two kinds of links

1, Reciprocal links

2, Inbound or One-way links.

Reciprocal link building

When a owner of another website places a link to your website on his site and you in return place a link to his website on your own website a reciprocal link is established.

It is an agreement made between 2 website owners to place exchange links.

How to build reciprocal links?

Step 1

List out websites with good page rank which are related to your own website.

Along with their URL, e-mail ID , Title and description. These details will help you at a later stage to make link requests.

Step2

E-mail each of the website owners from your list stating that you have visited their website and interested to exchange links with them. Mention the details about your own website also in this mail. Like the title , URL and the description.

Step3

Wait for the website owners to respond to your e-mail. Once you receive a positive response from any of the webmasters add their link to your website and checkout if the webmaster of the other site has added your link to their website.

Points to consider while going in for reciprocal link exchange.

1, Do not exchange links with websites which is only crowded with links and has no content at all. This kind of websites are called link farms. Links from links farm spoil your ranking on search engines.

2, Exchange links with websites which has a Page rank higher than the page rank of the website of your own.

3, The content of the website you are reciprocating should be related to the website content of yours.

4, The links page of the website you are considering to exchange links should have a link to their links page from their home page.

5, Never exchange links with porn websites, Casio websites, Drug websites, and illegal websites because search engines may penalize your website for exchanging links with illegal websites.

6, Provide minimum of two weeks time for the webmasters of other websites to place your link on their website. Because webmasters of good quality sites are busy people.

Inbound links

Inbound links are also called as one-way links. Links pointing out to your website from other websites are called one-way links. This kind of links are given more importance by the search engines. It is good to obtain as many one-way links as possible to climb up on search engines.

Methods to build inbound links:

Directory submission:

Submit your website to directories which list your website on their listings.

There are hundreds of free directories available on the net which provide one way links. While making directory submissions choose the most appropriate category to which your website belongs this way you increase the chance of your website link being published in the directories.

Article submissions:

Write useful articles related to the services or products you sell through your website. Do not for get to place text links on these articles pointing out to your website. The text on the link should be a keyword which best suits your website. There are chances that net browsers like to your article or place your article on their website with a link to your website or directly link to your article. This way articles bring in a lot of traffic to your website.

Software submission:

There are many websites on the net which accept software submissions. If your company has come up with an software you can submit these to the software directories with a download url on your website. This another good way to build one way links.

Press release submission:

When you launch a new offer or any special event is organized in your company you can write about these and submit to the various websites on the net that accepts news. Or you can make a generous donation to the needful and write an article describing the help you have done to others and submit it to the press release websites.

Participate in forums:

There are many forums on the net for every category. Each forum is meant for a particular topic. Choose a forum which discusses topics related to your website and participate in the forum by contributing useful information when ever you make a signature make sure you include a link to your website.

Create blogs:

Create a blog of your own and update the content of the blog frequently this way people will become regular visitors of your blog and place a link to your actual website on the blog and naturally people will start visiting your website too. Search engines give lot of importance to blogs because they contain fresh updated content. You can also submit the RSS feed of your blog to search engines and RSS Directories.

Above mentioned are the 6 best methods to build one way links to your website and drive more traffic naturally. One way links also help your website to get on top 10 rankings on all major search engines.

Best of luck on building good links to your website.

If you are a webmaster you will have undoubtedly heard of all the hype going on about one way and reciprocal links as a way of ranking higher in the search engines.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry is currently one of the most spectacular and dynamic entities that dominate the online economy, and the truth is that every web owner should keep an eye open for the trends that characterize SEO.

Reciprocal linking is – and always has been – one of the top web promotion methods.

The idea behind reciprocal links is simple: one webmaster places a link to a different website and, in return, that website also places a link back. This helps both websites as visitors from one will also go to the other and vice versa.

However, there are bigger stakes here – the search engines rank websites on several factors, but one of the most important concerns the number and quality of back links of your website. If you get hundreds of links from established websites that are also related to the topic of your own website, chances are your search engine placement will be excellent.

Pleasing the three main search engines

The power of reciprocal links is huge, as it is one of the most effective ways to get Google, Yahoo and MSN to favor your site. While you know, as a webmaster, that high quality content and good linking are the best keys to long lasting success, chances are you don’t like to spend hours and hours carrying out manual link exchanges.

This is why there are tens of thousands of amazing websites out there that are barely known by a few people – their webmasters are simply overwhelmed by the idea of exchanging the necessary number of links to rank high on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

While there is no set number of links that you need in order to have your pages displayed in the top 10 results, you will most likely need hundreds or thousands of links.

Automating the process

In order to address the needs of webmasters who would love to promote their websites but simply don’t have the time or energy to carry out hundreds of manual link exchanges, many web entrepreneurs have designed automated link exchange software and websites.

One of the most popular and innovative ways of dealing with link exchanges is through automated directories. Not only will these link exchange directories facilitate the link exchange process by offering other webmasters a fast and easy way to performing the exchange, but they also offer excellent link management systems. A great linking directory you may want to consider is:

o http://www.MyLinkMachine.com

Veteran Internet marketers will tell you that keeping track of active and broken links is almost as important as acquiring them in the first place, so the tools that come with such directories are real time savers. The automated link directory approach has several other benefits, such as the fact that you can categorize the reciprocal links, offering a better structure for both link partners and website visitors.