Link trades for SEO is an old school practice of websites linking to each other’s homepage or category pages in hopes to improve search ranks. These links are typically on the homepage of each other’s website. These links often link a website to a keyword or short phrase, or even the site’s name.
SEO links can be done on a one to one basis, or you can exchange links between multiple sites.
These links are not designed to generate tons of traffic, and that’s one misconception that people often have. These links are for the added TEXT based SEO benefit as a means to tell search engines where you are and what you’re about.
Search engines know you exist, sure. Do they care about it? The answer is NO. Search engines need to see that your content is important, so if lots of people are linking to you signals to search engines that you are somewhat
relevant/important, and that’s when your ranks slowly increase.
You need to exchange homepage and/or category links with other websites in hopes to rank higher for the keywords/phrases/site name. If you have a blogroll or place links in your footer, then that’s all you need. Your job is to find similar websites and offer to do a link trade with them.
After reading this, there’s one more important fact that you need to know. Google will often frown upon link building, but if you’re building links organically with relative websites and creating a true WEB of content that is all relative to each other, then it’s fine. If you’re linking news sites to news sites, and dog sites to dog sites – then that makes sense. That’s naturally organic and if you’re linking to each other IN CONTEXT, so the link is valuable to the readers – then that’s where your golden links will live.
If you’re a money blog linking to a kitten website, then you’re just spamming and you don’t deserve any ranks whatsoever.
Never pay for SEO unless YOU yourself knows SEO in and out. Otherwise you’re paying for nothing – or worse – something that would hurt your website.