Continuing on in this series of how to get your Church website noticed we take a look at link exchanges. Link exchanges are an idea that came out several years ago because of the way search engines work. Search engines rank sites that other people find interesting higher. IE if I reference a url like www.parentless.org then when the search engine reviews this page and finds that link parentless.org will get a boost because I felt it was good enough to include it.
Link exchanges then provide a place for you to get linked from. A good example for our purposes is . Chrisitan Top 1000 is a link exchange You register you site with them and then stick a small piece of code on your site You link to them and they link to you.   This can be good for both of you. The list provides a way to keep track of how many visitors a site gets. You can go to Chritian Top 1000 and find Church Host.info in the list. You'll see how many times this page has been viewed. The more places you put this little image the more views you register on the page and the higher you will rank. It can be fun to see were you compare to other sites on the net. a few other link exchanges that you might want to list with are.

There are more these are just the ones I am familiar with. Spend a few hours on the web for any place you can submit your url. Add it to your signature whenever you post anything to any website. The more often it shows up the better.

One word of warning in my first post in this series I talked about search habits changing. In the last couple years the practice of getting yourself linked to these "exchanges" has gotten a lot of negative press. Search engines like Google saw it as falsely inflating your popularity and being linked in can actually damage your rating at times. So when your first getting out on the web it's not a bad idea to get listed on these sites and add them to your list. However once your up and running and you've got a good ranking you might want to consider removing these links to your site. Your never penalized for someone else linking to you. However you can be penalized for who you link to.

The best way to increase the number of links on the web is to have church members with facebook accounts link to your church site. Also registering with catalogs that do not require you to link back to them. These do not qualify as link exchanges and as such do not cause the same problems with Google.

http://www.findachurch.com/a_hme/hme_hme.asp

http://search.crossmap.com/reg/

http://www.usachurch.com/ - USA church is a bit different first do a search in your area and then you'll be able to register so you can add your church.

http://www.churchangel.com/build/addproperty.php