When you are trying to promote your website, you want to make sure that you make as few mistakes as possible. However, there are a lot of mistakes people commit when making link exchanges that can be costly for their websites. Read the following ways to avoid making those costly link exchange mistakes:

1. Avoid Long URLs

If your URL is really long and wraps to another page it will be broken and essentially useless because people will not be able to link to your page. As a result, make your URL as short as possible in order to avoid this problem. If there is no way that you can avoid this, make sure you provide the clearest directions possible on how to cut and paste into a browser. Just know that by doing this, you are cutting down the percentage of people who will be willing to jump through the necessary hoops to access your site.

2. Only Link After You Have Been Linked to

If you link first then you might be forgotten. Don't allow this to happen. Instead, make sure you have received your link and notification before you link to the other website. If you link first you might simply be forgotten and never linked to, so this is a scenario you want to avoid at all costs because every link is important to your website's search engine ranking.

3. Assuming You Have Links

Do the research and know for sure whether you have links to your web page out in cyberspace or not. Do not assume for whatever reason that people are linking to your site simply because they agreed to or you have a linking software program. Instead, make sure you find out where you stand in the search engines and how many people are linking to you.

4. Don't Allow Redirects

If another site says that they are linking to you but the link has something funny going on, don't allow it. A true link should not use redirects or other sneaky tricks designed to rob you of the link's benefit.

Follow these above suggestions to avoid some very common link exchanges pitfalls. Everyone on the Internet is not interested in helping you further your business, but rather in furthering their own. Because of this fact, you have to make sure that your links are being placed in cyberspace and pointing back to you rather than other websites.

Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/