One of the strategies often used to get links from other companies is to do a "link exchange." That's basically when two companies agree to put a link to each other on their respective websites. It has traditionally been the most prevalant technique for obtaining incoming links. In fact, if your site has been around for any length of time, you've probably received unsolicited requests to exchange links, some coming from around the world! Unfortunately, link exchanges don't work as expected. Here's why:

1. They're still a lot of work. In order to get hundreds of incoming links, you have to be constantly soliciting links. Calculating your time, or your webmaster's time, to update your website every time you get a new link exchange partner, and it can become a nearly full time effort, not to mention the expense.
2. There's no natural place on your site to put all of the links. If you've ever seen a page with hundreds of links on them, you know you've found an active link exchanger. You just can't fit that many links on a nice site without diminishing your online image. Most end up hiding them on an obscure page that real people will never find.
3. Major search engines have started to diminish the value of exchanged links. One-way links (such as AncestorLinks^TM) are more highly valued. For a good explanation of why, read our Search Engine 101 page.
4. Links to your site from pages with hundreds of other links on them aren't nearly as valuable to search engines as those that are on pages with just a few other links (See Search Engine 101). Put plainly, your intended goal of boosting your search engine ranking and traffic is difficult to accomplish with link exchange partners.
5. The quest for hundreds of link exchange partners can force you to compromise in the quality of websites you exchange with. This can cause a lot of confusion to your customers, as well as clutter your site with junk.

While link exchanges are still a fine idea to do with a few key partners, they are a poor way to boost your visibility on the web. That's why LinkFamilies^TM are such a revolutionary idea. You get hundreds (or thousands) of inbound links pointing to your site, but you only place 10 links on your site.