Linking and link exchanges are when two websites agree to display one anothers websites URL on their website. This usually happens o a specifically made page - The Link Page.

Why Link Exchange?
Links pages generally don't make great reading, their main purpose is to drive traffic and increase your websites popularity. They do this in an advertising promotion way. Visitors to other websites see your link and click on it. Your chances of this are increased if your link appears on a page with relevant information to your website content.

But the main objective of links is for the purpose of search engines. Search engines count the number of links pointing to your website. They register each inbound link as a endorsement, therefore the more inbound links that you have linking to your website the better recommendation you have, which directly effects how popular search engines assume your website is. http://www.chatologica.com/WSP1/cgi/x.fcgi to check how many inbound links you have pointing to your website.

Google takes it one stage further. No only does Google count the number of inbound links, but it also checks the importance of those links. It classifies the importance of websites with a system known as Google Page Ranks. If you have inbound links of a higher Google page rank than your own, this improves your popularity in Googles estimation.

There are different formats for displaying links.

Links Page - A list of assorted links in a list.

Directory - Links categorised with a new page for each category. This is user friendly and less obvious as a links page, It can even be advertised as a feature for your visitors.

Top Lists - these list links based on their performance of sending you traffic. This ensures that your linking partners do not hide your link away or remove it from their website completely. Top lists are ideal if you are looking to get direct traffic from your link exchanges.

How do you find linking partners? This can involve a lot of long and laborious searching, trawling the Internet and sending emails requesting link exchanges. An easier way to do this is to join a few linking portals. These are online directories of potential reciprocal link partners clearly categorised to be user friendly. Simply search the directory and click on the websites that you think would make suitable link exchange partners. The link portal sends your chosen websites an automated email with your request, and they also let you know when your link has been approved. They even check that both parties have displayed the reciprocal links on the agreed pages. Such portals are free to join with limited features, which usually means that you are limited to 5 link exchange requests per day. You can up grade if you find this frustrating.

Which are best - Text or Image Links? Image or banner links can be very eye catching for your website visitors. However, not for search engines. Search engines do not see anything of interest with images. With text links, on the other hand, the search engines have words and content to read, especially if you have a text link followed by a short description.

A link page containing text links with descriptions will generally have a higher Google page rank than a link page of banners. A higher page ranked links page will in turn attract higher Google page ranked reciprocal linking partners.