Smart Link Exchanges: a Good Idea

Links guide us through the Web. That makes useful links quite valuable: "useful" links being those which lead to pages with content which is related to the content of the page they are placed on.

Webmasters have exchanged links for years as a way to increase traffic to their websites, putting a link to another site on one or more of their pages in exchange for a link or links put on the receiving site. Link exchanges work for bloggers, too.

Smart link exchanges, that is. To be useful for boosting traffic in the long run, the links at each end must lead viewers to something the viewer will find useful or interesting.

A pretty good example of link exchange is in this post: "Hin's Photo Blog, Digital capture of special memory," a blog maintained by my friend from BlogCatalog, Hin Man.

He recently topped $100 in earnings from his advertising partnership. I'll let him give the details, in AdSense $100 Movement. It's interesting from both the business and family point of view.

If "Hin" sounds familiar, it should. I discussed another of his blogs on August 2, 2007, in Blogging How-2: an Entry-Level Resource Blog.

I decided to link to Hin's pages again because he's a good friend of mine from an online community, and, more importantly, because our exchange of links is a good example of how link exchanges work.

I think our exchange of links makes sense, because the links are on-topic for both sites. Hin's AdSense $100 Movement uses a link to this blog as an example of his "AdSense $100 Movement" of people who are trying to legitimately optimize their AdSense performance. My links to his pages are on-topic, since they are examples of smart link exchange.

That's smart link exchange.

Not-So-Smart link exchange is when pages with no common ground exchange links. Since I enjoy thinking of ludicrous examples, a list follows. Serious readers are encouraged to stop reading here. Only nonsense will be found in the rest of this post.

Really Dumb (and fictional) Link Exchanges:

• Contemplation Aspects of Needlepoint with Beer Guzzler's Daily Belch
• Pink Bubble Gum with Emancipation of the Dissonance as Used in 12-Tone Compositions
• Northern Minnesota Wine Taster with Dirt Bike Demon
• Head-Bangers RoOl with Simple DIY