The more quality, relavant links you have to your website, the higher your site’s rankings will be in the search engines.

The link exchange process involves someone who is seeking to exchange links, contacting other webmasters and asking for a link exchange. This is normally a request for the second webmaster to add a link from their ‘links page’ back to the website of the person initiating the request. If the second webmaster agrees the person who initiated the request agrees to do the same in return.

However, this can be a tedious and time consuming process. This is especially because some requests are ignored or are never completed successfully.

Many webmasters supplement this linking strategy by seeking out opportunities to place links on websites without exchanging links. Here are five ways to create backlinks to your site without exchanging links:-

a) Discussion Forums - Place a link back to your site by adding it to the ’signature’ that you can include in every forum post you make.

b) Free Articles - Write interesting articles and submit them to sites that distribute articles to content hungry webmasters. Include a ‘blurb’ about yourself or your business at the end of each article, and include a link back to your site. These articles will then be picked up by other webmasters and used on their websites.

c) Search engines and directories - Submit your site to as many relavant search engines/ directories as possible.

d) Leave comments on weblogs - Most blogs allow visitors to leave comments and a link back to their site. Use this facility sparingly, by making occasional and relevant posts. Website owners are on the look out for ’spam’ comments and will delete suspicious comments without hesitation.

e) Buy links - This is controversial, but is common practice. Webmasters will buy links on high traffic sites to increase the number of customers coming to their own site. It is similar to placing an advert about your website on someone’s website. So in addition to getting a link back to your site you can get visitors, too.

These options will allow you to create backlinks from other people’s websites to yours without having to exchange links.

This, together with link exchanges can help drive visitors to your site and help improve your position in the search engines.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Webmaster Essentials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.