I was just listening to the latest Affiliate Buzz by James Martell and he was discussing link trading and other ways to get inbound links to your site. He was stating that link trading should only be a part of your overall linking strategy for your website and I completely agree. If you don’t know why incoming links to your site are important you may want to read about Google PageRank.

The search engines, and Google especially are becoming much smarter when it comes to determining the legitimacy of incoming links to a site. In fact, they can even tell if you have purchased inbound links and will factor that into the ranking of your pages. James suggested something of a 20/60/20 split where 20% of your inbound links should come from link exchanging, 60% from distributing articles to sites with your link in the article, and the other 20% from people who naturally link to your site because they like it.

The 20/60/20 split is a good mixture, I’m not sure if it has any real world testing behind it, but it does make sense. I think that mixing it up a bit is key, you want some sites that link back to you and some that don’t. I also have a theory that search engines if they don’t already, are going to start factoring in who you are linking to and the quality of those pages.

This leads me to discuss the most important link strategy of them all… quality. Your site should strive to stand on its own, it should strive to provide value and be of highest quality. If you do that then people will want to link to you, if you do that you will naturally be linking out to other quality sites, and if you exchange links you won’t be doing it only to help your ranking, but you will be making sure that you are building a quality directory of sites for your visitors as well.

Remember, the search engines only want to provide their users with relevant quality content. If your site does that then you’re already a huge step ahead in the game.