Traffic trade and link trade are business terms commonly used by website owners. If we go by dictionary, traffic refers to a cluster of vehicles moving on road. In the last few years, internet has grown exponentially; so much so that there are millions of websites all desirous of traffic (stream of visitors or surfers) that has the potential to be translated into customers. Thus traffic here means flow of net surfers to and from websites. This traffic is sought to be bought and sold. It can even be stolen, or traded between websites. There are many ways traffic can be traded. One of the simplest methods is to put a link of another site on your web page or can be complicated such as sending hits to numerous websites. This is called traffic trade as owners of websites are sending each other hits. However, this is different from link trade.
Link trading refers to the operation of linking your site to other sites by trading links. This is obviously done to generate more traffic to one’s own website. Link trading is beneficial in two ways. On one hand it increases search engine rankings and on the other hand links themselves generate traffic as surfers keep clicking on them. Link trade helps in improving search engine rankings as search engines base rankings depending upon the number of sites that link back to the site that needs to be ranked. The logic behind this reasoning is that if there are many sites sending back links to a site it must have relevant and meaningful content.
Both traffic trade and link trade are good and effective methods to increase the number of visitors to a website and used commonly by website owners.