It used to be that many people used to trade links with various other websites. Trading links was one of the many ways to generate traffic. Trading links also built and/or increased the amount of backlinks to a bloggers website. So, the question is, is this still a great way to create links for your Affiliate Marketing site or has it become a thing of the past?
Anyone in Affiliate Marketing or online marketing in general pretty much knows the importance of backlinks. I have written some posts (Links, Traffic and SEO, PageRank & How to Improve It, Backlink Building For Your Affiliate Marketing Site, More on Backlink Building) on backlinks, that go into more detail.
To briefly recap-
backlinks provide your Affiliate Marketing website with authority and
improve SEO. Search engines look at these inbound links as a sort of
vote for your site. When you can create a large amount of links, the
search engines will reward your Affiliate Marketing website with better
rankings in their search results.
An important thing to remember is that every link that is made has a different benefit in the search engine eyes. So, if you have a link on someones site that has a page ranking of 5, it's actually worth more in the search engines eyes if it's on the home screen versus being buried in a sub-page. So make sure you look at the page your backlink is on, rather than the page rank of the websites home page.
Back to the question of does trading links really help?
well...it can be a good thing and it can also be bad. So, I'll cover both....
First the good....
Trading
links can be useful, if you are linking to a site that is trusted. It
can also be useful if the site has a good page rank and also has a
steady flow of traffic. In order to maximize the link back to you site,
try to get it on the other sites home page rather than one of the sub
pages.
And now the bad....
Typically,
when you trade backlinks, the link pointing back to your website is
rarely on the home page. Unfortunately this lessens the quality and value of that
backlink. Sometimes this can even be overlooked or not even be counted
by the search engines. Additionally, most search engines, especially Google
favors one way links rather than link exchanges. One way links have
much more strength and quality then a link that has been traded. Lastly,
you can also hurt your search engine rankings if you end up trading
backlinks with a site(s) that had a bad reputation with Google.
Conclusion
I am not trying to minimize the benefits of trading links, since it can certainly help generate traffic to your Affiliate Marketing website. For me, I used this method of generating traffic in my beginning phase(s), when I first set up or created my Affiliate Marketing site. Once things were up and running smoothly and I had a good amount of traffic, then I went to the other ways of creating high quality backlinks to my Affiliate Marketing site, as discussed in my previous posts noted above.
Thats it for now, until my next post...
