Article Exchange - How it Works

Article Exchange is the most effective but most underused form of SEO today. It is ten times more effective than conventional link exchange.

What is Article Exchange?

Search engines like relevant links. This is why they count links that are embedded in content much more than pure link lists. Let’s say I have a website about stock trading and another webmaster has a site about foreign currencies. What I would do is locate a place on his site where I could fit in an article about "trading foreign currencies". In this article I would put 3 to 5 links to different pages on my site instead of just one link to my homepage in the resource box. I would link to pages on my site using the keywords "risk management for traders", "technical analysis for currencies" or "currency charts". The links would be every relevant for his site and mine. For any visitor this would mean a smooth transition when navigating instead of a hard break that you get when navigating from a "Other Resources" section to a homepage of a unrelated site.

I in turn would place one of his articles – let’s say about "currency exchange rates" on my site.

This is by far the best type of link exchange you will ever get. It is 100% natural, relevant and search engines love it. Also you get several links to specific pages on your site. You also get more direct visitors actually clicking inthis links. (Yep, links are also used by people navigating your site – not just search engines:-).

Those articles will rank in the search engines and get PR much faster than any "Links" or "Resources" page.

What Do you have to do?

When doing article exchange you would perform the following steps:

1. looking for related sites
2. contact those webmasters if they accept article exchanges
3. write an article with links to your site and pass it to the other webmaster
4. have the other webmaster write an article with links to his site
5. then you both have to upload your articles and integrate it in the site structure by at least putting one link to that article page so it will get spidered.

But this sounds like a lot of work...
You bet – it is. That's why only the pros are doing it. The problem is not writing the articles. It is that most webmasters don’t understand the power of this technique.

The Problem with Finding Article Exchange Partners

The problem is that most webmasters are somehow ‘conditioned’ to do reciprocal link exchange only. If you suggest what I was describing up to this point 95% of them won’t know what you are talking about. 4% will know about it but be too lazy to implement it. In fact it involves doing some work but they think it is much easier mailing hundreds of people and building link lists that get longer and longer but are totally irrelevant. That's why link lists get devaluated by the search engines.

If you are lucky to find one of the webmasters who does article exchange chances are they will be in a niche that is so different from yours that you will have a hard time finding a place to host their articles. (If I have a site about golf I really don’t want to have an article about kitchen remodeling.)

Article Exchange Networks

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a network where members could exchange articles among them and maybe even include some type of automation and quality control?

As far as I know there are currently two such networks: One is Stompernet and it costs $800/month (yes that’s not a typo) and they call it "StomperNet Content Exchange". Even if you would be willing to pay this price they are no longer accepting any members. By now they are like a closed secret society. Almost none of them talks about their exchange network. They know if too many people know about this everyone would do it and they would no longer have an unfair advantage.

Recently a smaller article exchange network has been launched by Chris Crompton. It is called the Content Spooling Network. They only charge $29 for their membership and members submit their articles using a special format that makes sure that each website is showing a unique version of the same article. They also review websites and articles to make sure the quality standards are met.

The only thing you do is place a small piece of PHP code in a separate directory on your site and select which categories you want to display articles for. This way you also get nice fresh quality content automatically.

Up to this point this is by far the best form of getting high-quality, relevant incoming links to your site almost automatically. And it’s 100% white-hat and natural.

However, I don’t know for how long they will still be accepting new members.
They can be found here:

http://www.contentspooling.net