Link building is performed to gain more and more backward links for your website. As you know, search engines give a lot of importance backward links. More importantly, it gives even more importance to the quality of backward links you have.
There are certain techniques to enhance your link popularity like one way linking, reciprocal linking and the recent phenomena "three-way linking". With the help of these techniques you increase your backward links which increases your search engine ranking.
Link exchange can be performed in two ways (1) using link exchange software and (2) manually. Generally, usage of software is not recommended by search engines. Reciprocal link exchange is a time consuming process. It requires lot of patience when performed manually. You need to have good communication skills and an ability to convince other webmaster to exchange links with your website.
There is also another aspect of link building i.e. the kind of sites you want to exchange links with. Either you want to exchange links with relevant site or with irrelevant sites. Depending upon the requirement you can exchange links with both irrelevant and relevant sites at one particular time. Also, we exchange links with those sites that have quality content and higher page rank which will enhance your search engine ranking.
