KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR LINK
EXCHANGES
by Sandi Moses
All of us want to increase traffic to our web sites. It
helps our search engine rankings, and provides us with potential new
customers. One of the best, and certainly least expensive, ways to
do that is by exchanging links with sites similar to our
own. However, you don’t have to accumulate very many
links before it becomes difficult to keep track of them
all. Many of them have similar sounding (or identical!)
names, descriptions and even URL’s. Let me suggest a simple way to
keep track of them so you don’t embarrass yourself and annoy others
by requesting to exchange links with someone more than once.
Create a simple spread sheet with four columns and no
more that 51 rows; one row for titling your columns, and 50 for
listing links. Search engines seem to not like link pages
with more than 50 links, so if you make your spread sheet only
capable of holding 50 items, you won’t exceed that arbitrary
level. Each link page on your site will be a separate
sheet in your spread sheet file. You can rename the tabs
along the bottom to match the page titles on your web site if that
helps you keep track.
Your four columns will be “Title,” “Description,”
“Page/Location,” and “URL.” Take the first link page on
your site and just type in the info. Copy and paste may
or may not work as some software insists on copying the hyperlink
info as well and makes necessary stuff like wrapping text difficult
or impossible. The page/location column is used to code
which link page you have the placed the reciprocal link onto, and
where up and down the page. For instance, the first link
on your page one is coded 1.01. The 12th link on page 2
is coded 2.12. The 18th link on page 3 is coded 3.18, and so
on. Once you have done that, have your software
alphabetize the page. The links will then be arranged in
alphabetical order so you can easily find whatever you are looking
for. Additions to not-yet-completed pages can just be
added to the bottom, and then re-alphabetized. Try
it!
| 
