Most webmasters I see trade with anybody and any website. It’s not totally wrong, but there should be more thought put into the process.

Course when your new, you don’t have much to give potential trade partners, often time you do need to, “take what you can get”.

When you do have something to give back, here’s a few things I have in my link trade process.

First and foremost you need Alexa, there is a great add-on for Firefox and I’m sure there is one for IE, not sure as I don’t use that browser much any more. Long time back I use to have official Alexa toolbar installed but found that it seemed to clog up my system, think it was a resource hog. The one I use for FireFox is SeachStatus and it’s great. Actually this plug-in does quite a few tricks. Of coure it has all the Alexa data, but it also has the Google info, most importantly Page Rank.

Disclaimer:

Okay, first off I know Alexa is not very accurate, but it does help tremendously as a gauge, at least to get some kind of an idea about a websites traffic. Also I know Google Page Rank doesn’t mean alot these days, but again, it is a gauge.

So, with that out of the way…

When I’m looking to trade, I look at a few things. First I load the site in my browser. From there I can see the Alexa Rank and the Google PR. While the Alexa rank is not accurate, if a site has a rank of 1,000,000 or more, you have a pretty good idea there is not alot of traffic there. A good guess at least. The same pretty much applies to the Google PR, but here’s a kicker, if the bar is grayed out, there is a good chance they have been banned in google. (they still do that don’t they? Can’t remember the last grey bar I saw actually).

Next I look at the site itself, if it’s a banner farm and looks like crap, it’s gone. Be real here a minute, who is going to trade with that kind of site? Probably ones that are not worth being networked with anyways. I don’t mean to put people down, I know there can be a learning curve when making websites. But honestly there are far too many resources available on the web, there is no excuse not to have at least a decent looking site. Or maybe I’m just an ass
Course some folks really need to get a second opinion.

Of course the site I am looking at trading with needs to have content that is related to mine. I also look at who else they trade with. Another important aspect is where they place their trades, if they are hidden at the bottom of a very long page, good chance you won’t see much traffic action. The exception being a very big and popular site where any link back at all is a good thing.

Last thing to remember, I for one have a mindset that this is a business for me, I am doing it to make money. With that said, some trades are just not worth it, I always try to get something out of the deal, other wise, why trade?

Well, thats all I can think of off the top of my head right now, and I need to get some other things done.

Hope it helps.