Article Swapping

One of the most powerful strategies for search engine optimization is swapping articles. Let me tell you how this works and how it will give you, and your article swapping partners.

Let me illustrate how this works:

• First you need a linking partner preferably one that has more than one web site. It also works great if you have more than one web site.
   
• You write an article that has content relevant to your site. Let's say you sell horseshoes. So, your article would be about Blue Horseshoes and would have at least one and potentially 3 or 4 links to pages on your site with the appropriate link text.
   
• Your link partner would have a folder/directory on his or her site that is named something like "business information" and the article would be stored in that folder.
   
• Your linking partner writes an article about his or her web site and that gets stored on a third web site in a folder/directory that has an appropriate descriptive title.
   
• The third partner, and this could be your linking partners second site, writes an article and it gets stored on you site in a folder/directory that appropriately named.
   
• Each of the partners puts a link on the home page to an index page in the new folder/directory. By linking to an index page in the folder it will be possible to build relationships with several article swapping partners and improve everyone's search engine position.

Let me describe a little more clearly what I mean by a "appropriately named folder/directory". If you look at DMOZ.org or Google's directory search you'll see that there are 16 different categories of information. Each of the categories is broken down into several subcategories. It's most effective if the folder name is based on the 16 categories or one of the subcategories.

Google, which is the main search engine we're focused on, considers where the link is coming from, at least in theory, to be part of the relevancy score of the value of a link. So, if we name the folder in which the article is stored a relevant name then the links in the article have a higher score than if they weren't.

I will admit that there's some discussion as to whether or not Google is actually ranking the relevancy of where the links are coming from, YET. There is, I believe, no argument that if it isn't in use today it will be at some time in the future. So, because this is a long term strategy, you should have it in place today.