It’s not a secret now that high positions and good performance in search engines – it’s all about LINKS. If you have lots of links from quality websites pointing to you as “seo tips and tricks” you are much closer to rank well on this phrase than those who don’t.
There I need to mention that “quality websites” means that they are 1) relevant to your theme and 2) the main thing – are for people, not just for linking.
So, lets start.
Link exchange can be automatic and manual. More information about all the types of link exchanges you can read in Wiki “Methods of website linking” article.
The most efficient one is manual link exchange, because it allows you select only high-quality and most relevant websites for your link and as a result don’t get in trouble with search engines.
In the article, this kind of exchange I’ll describe more precisely.
Also, link exchange can be two-way (reciprocal), three-way and four-way.
Reciprocal link exchange is when two websites share their reciprocal links. This scheme was very popular several years ago and was pretty effective at that time. Today reciprocal linking is much less effective, coz search engines can easily identify links of that LE-scheme and reduce their value (link juice).
Nowadays most effective schemes of exchange are three-way and four-way.
3-way exchange comes when one person have 2 websites of the same theme (#1 and #2), and there is another person who have only one website of the same subject. Then, the first party makes reference to the only website of his partner from his website #1, and his partner gives him a link to the website#2.
So, everybody now has one-way (non-reciprocal) link and the deal is mutually beneficial.
3 way link exchange
4-way exchange is when each of two sides has 2 websites, and each partner provides links to one site, and promotes his partner on the other site.
So, one side and his partner (the other side) in 3 way and 4 way exchanges receives one-way link, which is much more effective than reciprocal, coz it looks much more natural for search engines, it looks like a real vote, not just an arrangement (like reciprocal).
Where to find link exchange partners?
You can go the following ways:
1. Try to communicate with webmasters of websites of your niche you like and consider worth of exchange. Just send an e-mail with your LE-offer.
2. Search for partners to trade links on forums. Most popular forums for link exchange are:
3. Share links with your friends, colleagues, etc.
During a process of exchange you should pay attention to the following things:
* Field, theme of a site (is it relevant to your topic?)
* Rankings (try to find websites that have good rankings on their targeted keywords)
* PageRank of your partner’s website. The higher PR of a website is, the more weight will be given by its reference (link juice).
* Other important indicators characterizing quality of website – number of pages in Google index, Alexa rank, age of domainname, number of outbound links, etc.
* GEO affiliation of domainname (.com or .co.uk or .ca) and country hosting its IP. So, if you want to achieve high positions in google.ca (Canadian Google), it’s necessary to get as many links from sites with .ca or sites hosted on Canadian IP’s as you can.
These items will help you to understand how much weight can be brought by a reference (link) to your site. In other words, you can estimate link’s juice.
Be selective, and at the same time don’t be greedy for really good links!
Good luck to you! 
Hello!
My name is Tanya.
