Link Trade Partners

Before you begin, you should consider your strategy with respect to the websites to which you plan to link. The key here is to trade links ONLY with relevant websites. A relevant website is a website that shares your target audience. If the website would be of interest to visitors to your site, and vice-versa. Then it is a good prospective link trade partner. Trading links with irrelevant websites is a waste of time, mainly because irrelevant sites that link to you don't share your target audience. As such the chances of getting qualified traffic from them is slim indeed. Your time is much better spent linking with relevant sites.
You should be trading links with relevant websites all over the Internet. Not just other commercial websites, or other SOL websites. The entire Internet is open for link trades, regardless of the type of site, or where they are hosted.
Give careful consideration to whether or not you want to trade links with direct competitors. In many cases, you may not want to do that, though there are other times when this might be appropriate. For the most part you want to trade links with other websites that share your target audience, but are not your direct competitor. For example, if you sell office supplies, you might want to trade a link with a graphic design website, but not with another office supply website. Remember that people who buy office supplies (businesses) also buy graphic design services. The possibilities are virtually limitless.