There are many free link exchange sites on the internet. Link exchange is beneficial. However, competition online is increasing. In any given industry, most of the time, the sites competing for top positions in the search engines have over 1000 links to their website. To use a free link exchange program can be very time consuming, slow and discouraging. Especially when trying to reach that 1000 mark one link at a time.

There are programs online that will provide you with hundreds or thousands of backlinks in a short period of time.

There are some things you should make note of before starting a link exchange program:

Make sure you use keywords in and around your link - You may think that your link, buried in a sea of 25 other links will never be seen by an actual visitor. But, while no one usually goes to someones link page looking for a site to visit, search engines will pick up on your keywords and sometimes rank that page with your link on it high in the search engines. This can result in direct traffic for your targeted keywords.

Site wide links do almost no good - A few years ago, having a link on every page of another website would increase your search engine rankings considerably. However, nowadays a site wide link on another website will not help you at all.

Links exchanged with relevant sites increase your ranking - Figure that the search engines are trying to determine what industry and topics your pages are related to by who is linking to you. The closer in relevance your link is, the more it helps you rank higher for those pages.

Try more than one option. Spend your time wisely by spreading out your efforts. Do a little manual link exchanging. Try a couple of automatic link exchange programs. Write good content for your website to increase natural linking.