There are many SEO specialists who will argue that there are many "quick" ways to get your website indexed and ranked in a short period of time, but these quick-fix link strategies often don't pan out beyond offering some marginal immediate traffic and no long-term value. Many will agree that building too many links using questionable practices like "blog networks" and other multiple-linking plans will only hurt your website in the long-run. If you invest in too much too fast, you're liable to earn the wrath of the search engines, which will just make it harder and take longer for you to rank.

By far the best link strategies are the ones where the webmaster or website owner generates their links in a natural, progressive style. There's no reason to go too fast, even if your website is created for profit. Creating genuine original content (this is like gospel now) will generate natural links from relevant websites who are interested in sharing subject matter that relates to their own sites. While some call this "linkbaiting", writing or generating quality content, whether in articles, reports, stories, or news, will earn you links, build up your website, and give the search engines something to search.

Don't waste your time (and money) on useless linkbuilding practices like blog networks, as you're likely to find out that the search engines don't want 500 articles written about exactly the same thing, when there is only one true source for the information. And don't be surprised if your blog network provider has all of his blogs removed for violating terms of use. Many of these get-rich-by-posting-duplicate-articles bloggers disappear overnight, along with their blogs.

Everyone talks (or writes) about relevant links when it comes to link building, but not everyone understands what relevant linking is all bout. Simply put, a relevant link is an inbound or an outbound link to another website that is in the same category or niche, a website that contains "relevant" information related to your website and your visitors.

Think of a relevant link as a recommendation by one website to visit another website that has complementary content that your visitor would appreciate. When you are surfing the Internet, having relevant links on subject matter you are looking for is helpful to you, in one regard making you more likely to click through to the relevant site, and less dependent on the results of search engines.

As a link builder, your concern for linking to other relevant sites is important in how the search engines trust your site, as much and more than do your visitors. Search engines such as Google will weigh the value of relevant links in their algorithms to determine the value of your link, and the power that link has in determining the results of keyword search requests.

Examples of relevant links might include two websites about sports. Now determining how relevant a relevant link is, is debatable, so if you wish to link a soccer website to a hockey website, it would need to be determined whether or not your links are relevant or not. If you consider your visitors, would you think that a link to a soccer website would be interesting or useful to them?

Reciprocal Link And Take Back The Internet From The All-Consuming Search Engines

The Internet has been around for a number of years now, and while some say it has progressed and become more efficient--if more commercial than originally intended--than it was in its infant years. Of course the Internet wouldn't be known as the World Wide Web if there wasn't some inherent way to connect all of the websites together, and I don't mean through DNS and Internic and the complicated backbones that wire it all into one functional network. The true networking was done through linking, and web rings, and through email and word of mouth. That's how people found out about other wonderful websites, and ones that people would have an interest in.

But now, major search engines think that they must be the ones who control what sites should have importance, and they decide who should get the attention when it comes to keywords and terms, and SERPs, and other complicated algorithms that determine what websites you should be looking at when you ask for search engine results. It's these same search engines that are implying that it's a bad practice to link back to your friend, or to that other site that shares the same interests as you, and is more than happy to give you a link back to your site, because after all, you have something in common, and the traffic is going to come and go like the tide. Give and take.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through natural (organic or algorithmic) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", and the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

One way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. A "one way link" is a hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link only goes "one way" in direction. It is suspected by many industry consultants that this type of link would be considered more natural in the eyes of search engines.

One way linking is an endorsement of a website, whether its intention is to provide additional visitors and traffic, or to help the website increase its position in a search engine.

One effective way to build this type of one way linking is by distributing articles through content sites and article directories. These articles generally contain an About The Author box that contains a one-way link back to the author's URL. When publishers use these articles, those one-way links help authors increase their page rank.

Other methods to increase one-way links is to pay for them, ask for them, or have them occur naturally, because other sites are interested in your website and its content.

Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.

Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site's reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.