Let's face it. Getting webmasters to link to your site is difficult.

But a good linking strategy is necessary to build link popularity - a measure of the popularity of a website based on the number of other website's linking to it. And at the same time it has become very difficult to compete on the internet with websites that have 1000s of backlinks, sites that have their carefully chosen anchor text firmly in place.

So let's do the math. If you as a webmaster were to gain one new link to your site every day for one year you would only have 365 backlinks. Even with a more optimistic 2 links a day we are still only talking about 730 links. They may seem like a lot but in the real world of the internet and depending on the keywords you are competing for, you may need hundreds or even thousands more.

Why? Because link popularity is the ultimate tool in achieving ranking. Link popularity is measured by the number and quality of inbound links to your site. The more you increase the link popularity of your web site, the probability of maintaining a higher search engine position for a longer period of time becomes more likely. Inbound links help to attain high search engine rankings for your web site, while producing traffic from visitors clicking through on the links themselves.

So you have a dilemma. You need hundreds maybe even thousands of inbound links to your site. But how can one individual possibly achieve this goal given the numbers of backlinks needed and the hours it takes to accomplish such a task?

There is only one solution. A link exchange. The only effective way to get the sheer amount of backlinks needed to compete is to coop with other webmasters in a large group and share the wealth of pages that is owned by the group. It is similar to risk management. You utilized the power of large numbers of people.

Link exchanges are sites that bring webmasters together to cooperate in the exchange of links for the benefit building both pagerank and link popularity. They are commonly used to gain link popularity which will increase ranking in search engines like Yahoo! or Google. Both of these engines use link popularity as a factor in calculating web pages ranking in the search engine results. One such link exchange, http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/?s=4380, is just one of the many sites that will help you accomplish your inbound link goals.

Be very careful to choose the correct anchor text when signing up to a link exchange. Anchor text is the text within the hyperlink. The major search engines look carefully at this text to help determine what your page is about. For example if there are 1000 pages linking to yours with the words "buy a car" then you will likely do very well when someone uses the search phrase "buy a car". Simple huh?

An example of the power of anchor text is what is known as a "google bomb". If enough sites link to a specific website with the same anchor text then that site will rank well for that term regardless of whether the keywords are even found on the page.

Remember to let the other webmasters painstakingly search out the individual reciprocal linking partners while you and I harness the power of large numbers of webmasters by using a link exchange.

Timothy D. Arnold is arguably one of the most prominent experts in the site promotion area. You can visit his site at http://www.free-text-link-exchange.com