Yeah, like if your site is about red t-shirts, pretend you are looking for red t-shirts, and make a list of all the sites you liked (from a consumer standpoint.) Those sites would probably be good as link partners
Well the first thing you need to do is find a website that is not only relevant to your website but is also optimized with the keywords your website focuses on. Then you need to see how many outbound links are present on the website to other websites. If there are too many outbands links you do not want to add your link to the website becuase otherwise Google may penalize you for submitting your link to a link farm. How many outbound links? Twenty is the absolute max for me. But I would say you should try to find a website with no more than 5 outbound links (yours being the fifth one). Ofcourse then you need to contact the webmaster and strike a deal about placing your link and placing their link. Also remember to decide on which type of link you want (i.e site wide links or only on the main page). If you have any more concerns feel free to ask. Hope that helps.
consider also that benefit that you can get from your prospected partner(s) and see if its useful for your visitors.. [vice versa]
Guess what. Link exchanging died in 2007. Don't bother focusing on this. Sure, link to places you think are useful but do it without asking anything in return. What you need are 1 way links to make any difference. Seriously, this is absolutely true. I can't wait to hear all the nuh-uhs though. Sheree
You can control the outbound links... Beware of those related links that are link farming especially to unrelated ones... Only to gather backlinks.... I have seen many like that... You can view their links if its they are all related to the site...