The key to success is to think from your link partner's point of view. If you had an established, popular site and someone approached you with a link exchange request, what would you be looking for?

The tips below are written with the assumption that you are actively approaching other sites, but the same rules apply even if you are just putting instructions on your site and waiting for other webmasters to approach you. Think! Why would another webmaster be keen to exchange links with your site?

One thing to bear in mind: Most successful sites get hundreds of requests every month. That doesn't leave much time to check each site and decide whether to approve the request or not. You have make the decision easy by giving them everything they want and making life as easy for them as you can.

Always link to the site before submitting your request.

Why? Almost everyone has been through this: You get a request by email, it looks good so you link to the site and hit reply. A few weeks later after several more emails and a lot of frustration you give up trying to get your return link and stop linking to the offending site. If you want your request to be taken seriously rather than deleted, you have to prove that you mean business.

Always make sure the page with your outgoing links has a reasonable amount of pagerank.

Because it's one of the main things webmasters are looking for and if it's not there then they wont be interested.

For new sites this isn't easy, but it's still vital, so try some of these tactics to improve the situation before proceeding any further:

Always make sure the location of your outgoing links is obvious from your sites homepage.

Imagine this: Someone looking for link exchange partners stumbles across your site, they have a quick look at the main page and yes, it looks like a great possibility. So what happens next? They need to know if you have a links page. Chances are they will scour your main page and if they find a section labled partners or resources then that's great. If not, they will move on to the next site on their list, and you've both missed out on a golden opportunity.

Always supply example link codes on your site.

For those webmasters who are slightly indecisive, thinking, "shall I link to this site, or shall I not". Make things as easy for them as possible! The easier you make it, the more links you will get.