Every now and then I see people asking about the simplest of the things, which is the most important issue of seo. While effective link exchange can take you to top an ineffective way can even ban you! I keep on hearing that get links from the same makret as your... but i have a different feeling to this. It's not bad to get links from sites that are not of your market... People get it all wrong. The only thing that is needed is the proper linking structure. Explain this to every webmaster, the necessity of having a links directory so that people may find good source of site from there sites only! Exchange link with all the sites until they are not using anything spammy. Just think, if you are to get a link from whitehouse.gov or some how you got a link from MSN.com, would you see that does it fit to your market or not! A big NO! A simple link from those authority sites will make you the authority of your market! Hope you understand the point. Take care Manish
I don't know how long you have been doing SEO, but there is nothing more important to improving your sites google rankings than relevant back links. Getting a bunch of links from sites that have nothing to do with your site won't help your rankings and can get your "link directory" banned from having PR, or worse, by google. Non-relevant links will pass PR, but won't help you with with your rankings. The White House isn't going to exchange links with your site, but sure, you aren't going to turn a link like that away. That's just common sense. If you want to improve your google rankings, the worst thing you can do is start exchanging links with anyone who will link to you. Every link you put on your page decreases the outgoing value of each link. You'll wind up with a page with 100 non-relevant links and then relevant authority sites won't want to touch your site. I get hundreds of link requests a week and I delete any site that has a non-focused link page with a zillion links on it. Take your time and seek out the best sites related to your site's theme. It's a lot more work, but you'll be happy with results in the long run.
My rule of thumb is that content is king. I consider links on my sites content. I would only put relevent links on my site. My goal is to help my visitors get what they want. If I do this, my site will succeed. Likewise, I wouldn't want or expent anyone to link to me that I wouldn't want to link to them or if my site is not relevent to their content. It's common sense. Michael