Why Exchange Links

by Mark Perkins

If you exchange links or advertising banners with a competitor, you both win.   The reasons are not necessarily obvious, but when you learn more about internet marketing, you will see why.  First of all, to understand why it is important to exchange links, you need to understand how internet search engines operate.  Search engines have very sophisticated programs called crawlers that travel from site to site on the internet and examine and rank each site.  For the crawler to find a site, it must be either be included as a link on another site, or it must have been submitted to the search engine operator for submission.  The crawler has special analysis software that checks each site and ranks it according to it's importance.  One of the most important factors in this ranking is the number of other sites that have a link to the site.  If the site has a high enough ranking, then the search engine will list the site.  If your site is not listed with a search engine, then it will never show up when a customer or visitor is searching for sites like yours.  In addition, the order in which the search results are listed are according the the importance ranking for the particular keyword combination.

The most sophisticated web crawlers, such as Google and Yahoo, look for links to your site in related websites.  For this reason, having your reptile site listed in the links sections in other reptile sites will get you a higher ranking and therefore a better placement on a search.  You can check to see how your site is doing by going to one of the major search engines and doing a search on the keywords that a prospective visitor to you site would use.  This might be something like "bearded dragons", or "corn snakes for sale".   Then scroll through the results of the search to see if your site is listed.  If it is listed on the first page, then you are doing great.  But if it is not listed at all, or if it is listed on any page higher than page three of the search, then you need some work to get visitors to find your site.  The guide in "get more hits on your reptile website" can help you.