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By Skip: If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

It’s a pretty simple concept. Say I have a veterinary practice and you run a pet store. I ask you to put a link to my vet business site on your pet store site and, in exchange, offer to put a link to your pet store site on my vet business site. This works well because we have complementary, noncompetitive businesses that target the same audience: pet owners.

These reciprocal links help drive traffic from my site to your site and vice versa. They also help us boost our rankings in search engines. This is because — generally speaking — search engines look at the number of links to your site from other sites when listing sites in search results.

How to get started with link exchanges

You have several ways to set up link exchanges.

Do it manually. The upside of this method is that it’s free and you can be assured that your links reside only on sites you deem worthy. The downside is that it takes a lot of work. It typically goes like this: You search the Web to find good sites that are complementary to yours, and then place a link to the site on your site. Next, you send a personalized e-mail to the site’s owner or webmaster asking them to reciprocate. You might also suggest where you think your link should reside on their site, and provide some wording that they could use.
Use link-management software. To avoid the drudgery of reviewing sites to find potential link partners, you can purchase software that does that — and more. iBusinessPromoter is one example, and has a free trial version you can download.
Join an automated link-exchange program. You can pay to have your site automatically included on all the Web sites of program members. A filtering option is typically available to exclude your site from link exchanges you don’t want. Check out LinksMaster.com for an example of this type of program.
Pay someone else to create your links. A number of companies specialize in finding and managing linking services, dramatically minimizing your involvement. LinkStrategy.com is one such service.