You are now ready to start promoting the site. You should start this by setting up a link exchange page. Find partners with merchandise or products that relate to what your site offers and place a link to their site on yours. Then contact them and tell them that you have placed a link to them and that you would like to set up a mutual link exchange with them.

Exchanging links is a great idea but you need to do it in a way that is supportive of your site. For example if you have a site selling eggs why would you want to link your customers to a site selling hammers. Linking allows search engines to establish an importance to your site when they search the web for relevant material using their automated software called spiders. Once you are found the search engine has to index you based on your importance to the world wide web clientele.

Google.com helped start this idea.  When adding websites to their own search engine, Google uses the automated software (called Spiders) that "crawl" or search the web, following hyperlinks from site to site.  These Spiders document how many links exist on the web to your website.  Google states, "When a URL is submitted to Google, we look for it in our next crawl.  If you've already submitted your URL, your site could easily appear in our new index, which will go up when the current crawl is completed.  However, if no other site links to yours, it may be difficult for our crawler to find you.  Conversely, if many sites link to your page, there is a good chance we will find you without your even submitting your URL.  If Google has not found your pages, it is because we have not encountered any links on the web pointing to your site.  If you increase the links pointing to your website, Google will likely find your site in the future."

Quality Versus Quantity
So, the more links to your site that exist on the web, the more likely the big name search engines will both pick your site up, and list it high in users' search results.  Understand though, that simply creating a few hundred pages with your URL on it and posting them to a website for search engine Spiders to find won't automatically get you listed.  Search engine Spiders are smart critters, and they know junk websites from quality websites.  How?  They examine each website's link popularity!  A link to your website on powerhouse CNET.com (with a high link popularity) is much more valuable than a link to your website on bobspants23.org (with a low link popularity).  With this in mind, it may actually be better to have one link to your website on a popular site, than 50 links to your website on a multiple unpopular sites.  To carry this idea further, another "no-no" when it comes to getting your link on the net, is posting them in low quality list sites, also called "link farms" or "banner farms."  Big search engines like Google.com will ban sites that participate in these type of list sites.

You will find this very useful for getting started with your own link program.

• Linking101.com
  Information and Tools for webmasters to improve their link popularity via link exchanges.