I am always surprised, when I read articles and ads that instruct webmasters to exchange links with similar websites. I have tried it when I started to build websites. It simply didn't work for me.

Traffic is the dream of every webmasters. Without traffic, you get no sales, no subscribers, no publicity, and none of your reasons of being online is reached.

Link exchange takes lots of effort to achieve simply because, you have to find similar websites to yours, find the contacts, send an email to the webmasters, and then wait for an answer.

After doing all the work, you may not get an answer or worse yet, you might get response from website owners who are trying to sell you their products.

Some webmasters try to automate the process of exchanging links, and join fee based services that coast $19.95 and up to help them get links faster.

Some of the problem I encountered when exchanging links with other webmasters are:

1- Webmasters who are willing to exchange links are desperate of traffic, or usually are not high traffic website owners. Think of it, if you get lots of traffic to your website and added a link on your website pointing to a different website, you will be diverting traffic away from your website.

2-Who wants to send you traffic if you aren't able to send them back similar number of visitors.

3-You probably ask how someone knows how much traffic I get to my website without reading my website logs. There is some websites that give you an idea of low or high traffic websites. A good estimation of website traffic is the traffic ranking done by Alex.com.

4-Another reason is that, some webmasters don't link back to your website, even if you added a link to their website.

5-Some webmasters charge you a fee to add a link to your website. After you pay, you don't know how long they will keep it. That by itself, will need lots of effort to keep track.

6-Another problem with link exchange is that few links don't help. You will need lots of links pointing to your website to make a difference. Again, because you are dealing with website that don't have lots of traffic.

In conclusion, I don't recommend the webmaster of any new website to try link exchange to create traffic to their website. If you want to use this technique, use it last. Again I am not an expert on website traffic, I am a website designer sharing my experience with traffic building techniques.