When You Are ready to Start Your Exchange Link, now what you really have to do are these:

Once you have designed your own link information and a
resource page to put up the links information from your link
partners, it is time to start asking other blogger to
put Your Link Information on their own links page.

Choosing your link partners for reciprocal link exchange

Think niche. Your blog has a theme, a specialty-
a marketing niche. Choose link exchanges with blog that
have similar themes. If your blog is about handmade
candles then focus on blogs that offer handmade,
handcrafted products. Explore blogs with candle
accessories, home decor, gifts and aromatherapy.

Blogs that offer what you believe your visitors would
enjoy are where you focus your link exchanges. Choose sites
that are complementary to your own, not competitive. The
more closely related the subject of your link partner's
site, the more relevant your own link description will be to
their visitors and to search engines.

Page Rank - the higher the page rank of the site that you
exchange links with, the more impact on search engines.
That does not mean that you should not exchange links with
blogs that only have a page rank of 3 or higher but the
majority of your link exchanges should be with blogs
ranking well with top search engines.

Test your own link popularity - you have already exchanged
links with some blogs and now you want to know if it's
helping you with search engines. I found UpTimeBot usefully
for getting a handle on what's happening with your link
exchange program.

Its disheartening that Google is slow to catch up with your
link exchanges but be persistent in your weekly time to set
up quality reciprocal link exchanges.

The other major search engines will help you with traffic
and link popularity until Google does it's own bit.
Persistence with your link exchange program does pay off!

In the end, Google DOES catch all the hard work and you will
start getting the traffic and page rank your blog
deserves!