If you are not Trading Links, you are ignoring the single most valuable web promotion tool available… period.
Let us explain…

For years, it was believed that in order to get listed on search engines, you had to submit your site. The big debate has always been whether you should use an automated tool, or do it manually. The effectiveness of submitting to search engines is nowhere near what it used to be.

We have long known that Search Engine Submission was getting less effective. Trading Links replaces the effectiveness of submission, it gives you a better shot at good listings than submission ever could. Let's look at the process of a typical submission. You submit your site to the engine, and if successful, the search engine receives your request. They may look at it. It might be spidered or it might be ignored. We have all heard the stories of hundreds of thousands of submissions getting wiped out, or those that some engines penalize sites that submit, or that engines ignore most submissions. Furthermore, more and more engines are charging for submission. In fact, if you have been keeping up, you certainly know what the engines say they want. They say that they want to discover sites with relative content. Some have said they prefer sites that are discovered naturally by their spiders. So what does that mean? If a search engine spider visits your site and follows a link to a different site that isn't already indexed, that new site has been naturally discovered.

Another large issue is that of link popularity. More and more engines have gone to this for ranking. Simply put, all other things being equal, if the engine has 500 sites in its database that link to your site, and it has 1,000 sites in the database that link to your competitor's site, your competitor gets higher ranking than you.
The problem for many webmasters is that they don't have a list of a hundred sites that will provide links to them. So, for quite some time the answer to this question has been to submit to link directories (often called FFA sites). AddWeb answered this call long ago, and maintains a huge database of these sites. However, they have become less and less desirable for several reasons. For one thing, submit to these sites and you get bombarded with spam. That is the price you pay for these sites. More important these days is that they are not as effective as they once were. More and more search engines will not index off of the pages of known link directories, and your link rotates off of their pages so quickly due to thousands of sites listing on them, that the chances of getting found on one are very low.

Here is what you can expect if you had 100 trades:

1. 100 other websites would provide links to your website. If any one of those sites gets spidered by a search engine, your chances of being naturally discovered by the engine are very good. If you get spidered, you will have likely been added by the engine without having submitted your site.
2. For every site you are trading with that is indexed on a specific engine that ranks based on Link Popularity, your own link popularity score will be higher.
3. The pages that link to you are real. They are not dynamic pages that scroll you off like link directories.
4. The pages that link to you are on normal websites that are attracting human traffic that are far more likely to click on your link than they would on a link directory listing.
5. You are in an active role of cross-promotion with another person. The benefits of each trading partner's own promotion will benefit you indirectly, and vice-versa.
6. You are active in a type of promotion that search engines have supported for years. Remember, search engines have long said that they want to discover links on pages that are human-maintained and are relevant. This is exactly that. The only difference is that the LinkTrader system operates as a matchmaker, and helps automate some of the tasks.