Do you participate in link exchange? You may be confused about how having links on your website benefits you. In fact you could be linking your way into obscurity. Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want - to invite people to leave?

Your focus should be on getting more links pointing to your website. This increases your traffic and search engine rankings. However, the more outbound links you have on your webpage, the more it weakens your Google page rank as well you are asking your visitors

to click on those outbound links and visit someone elses website.

Search engines are really only interested in links to your site which are from a site that has similar content as your own. Apparently, there is evidence to suggest that having links from sites that are not relevant to the content of your own, can even damage your position with the search engines.

Link exchange can be a good thing but there are few things to keep in mind:

1.As said before having too many outbound links on your site invites your visitors to leave and may damage your search engine ranking.

2.Exchanging links with sites with poor quality content or a poor page rank can hurt your rankings.

3.Having a link directory on your site doesnt encourage Google to crawl your site more. And just because Google is crawling your site more, doesnt necessarily mean that you are going to improve your ranking.

4.If you must have outbound links make them worth your while ie. affiliate links or other promotions.

Yes, link exchanging can be helpful but there are other ways that you can get lots of inbound links for your site, without having to provide reciprocal links. And these methods tend to be more effective.

1. Write short articles, 300 to 500 words, on subjects closely related to your site, and then distribute them over the internet through various article directories. People who are looking for content for their websites, or newsletters, can then look through the article directories to find fresh content. If they choose to publish your article, they then have to include a link back to your website from their site. Just a few articles can get you 50 inbound links.

2. Submit a press release - this won't always get you a large number of inbound links, but it can get you top ten listing.

3. Make sure your site is listed in some of the directories across the internet.

4. Start an affiliate program.

5. Create a viral marketing campaign. You could try a free short ebook that contains some useful information, and a link back to your site, which people are allowed to distribute freely.

The last thing you want to do is to link your way out of business. Be wise when you participate in link exchange and apply some other methods to gain quality traffic to your website.