by: Liz Beresford

Don't you just hate the process of exchanging web site links? Finding sites that are relevant, placing a link on our site, contacting the web master to request a link swap, waiting for a response, that may never come... you know the routine.

Of course no one wants to exchange links, not really. Yes, we want lots of links from important sites pointing to our webs, but we aren't all that keen on having links pointing out again. We have worked hard to get visitors - why would we want to send them away again, and not just away, but maybe into the arms of a competitor? Not only that, but links pointing out take some of your web page's PR with them. Wouldn't it be great if there were a better way to increase link popularity?

In the last couple of months I have found such a way and it works like a charm. Oh I have done the hard yards trying to find high PR sites that wanted to exchange links with a low PR site. There aren't many altruists in this game unfortunately! Most of the sites I exchanged with were not doing much better than me. Those that invited me to exchange links with them were either totally unrelated to my topic or were link farms.

I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out a new way to get links in. I bought link exchange software, which made it easier and quicker to find relevant sites, but the results were mediocre. You need a lot of links pointing in to make a difference to your ranking, and its hard to get more than a couple of dozen by link exchange alone.

Like all good ideas its so obvious when you discover it that you can't think why it took so long. What do web masters running information sites need, apart from lots of links? New content of course! They have to keep their sites lively so that visitors will return. If they have an ezine it has to be filled with fresh content each time it goes out. Offering relevant content for free solves the web master's problem. That's right, there is a great market for articles to feed this ever hungry machine.

When you write an article and syndicate it all you ask in return is that whoever uses it includes your links. This means that you get links coming in from a lot of sites, many with high PR and you don't have to reciprocate. If your article is published in an ezine it may reach thousands of people, after which the ezine is frequently archived, together with your links.

This isn't the only easy way to get links that I have discovered, there are others and if article writing doesn't appeal there is bound to be one tactic that does. If you would like to learn more about article writing and other ways to raise your link popularity I can highly recommend a downloadable video tutorial by Louis Allport. He teaches 7 fast ways to get links and ultimately increase traffic to your site. Most of them are free. Take a look: http://www.net-abargain.com/. This course is new and is being sold for a low introductory price of $24.95 for the month of December.