The Golden Rule
Do it for your visitors.
Read through Google's guidelines on link schemes.
Use a rel="nofollow" on ad swap links, this way Google will know that the link is there as a benefit for your visitors and not for your page rank.
Vertical Marketing: Ad Swaps
A lot of small sites either offer advertising, or their owners are open to ad swaps. The same rules hold here as with link exchanges though, and if you go out looking for them, you'll not have much success.
In the course of business networking, you'll run across people that you get along with, and who have a website that will compliment yours. Keep your eyes open for the opportunity for ad swaps within the course of normal associations with people. You'd be surprised how many you can find, I run into quite a few every week. But I don't spend time hunting them down.
Most established websites get lots of "link exchange" spam. And I do mean a LOT. If you offer ad swaps, you'll get a lot of trash offers too. The sad fact is that most people who approach you for ad trades who do not already know you will have trashy sites. Only 1 in a couple hundred will be legit.
This means that when you are on the receiving end of ad swap requests from strangers, you tend to throw them out. So if you send out requests to people YOU don't know, they will treat them as spam also. People are pretty reluctant to even swap ads with someone with whom they do not have some kind of established relationship.
So go back to forum participation, trade association memberships, networking groups, etc, to get ad swaps. And then just pay attention to the people around you, and when you stumble on someone with a quality site that compliments yours, make an offer after you have some kind of basic relationship established.
Make sure you never trade unless you have checked out the other site. Don't just swap and stick their link on your site, because if their site is banned, or using tactics that will get it banned, then it will hurt YOUR site to have their link on it. Make sure the site has pages indexed in Google. Look for Black Hat Seo on the site, and make sure the site has a good, high quality feel about it, with solid informational or product content.
Written by Laura Wheeler
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