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?

The opposite is more apparent when you are looking at links that are not relevant, or what could be considered "bad neighbourhoods". A bad neighbourhood might normally consist of gambling websites, adult websites, and other websites with questionable content. It's not going to be considered relevant if you link your hockey website to a poker website--although if you were operate a hockey betting website, and you linked to another gambling site, your link would likely still be relevant, regardless of the "neighbourhood".

The easiest way to proceed with your link building, is to find other like-minded websites that fall within the same category and deal with relatively similar subject matter. If you a business website, that might be more of a challenge especially if you do not wish to link with your competitors, however finding open websites that discuss the same subject material would likely be beneficial for your linking strategies.

The way that search engines treat your website is constantly changing, however it's always going to remain a good practice to link to relevant websites, for your visitors' sakes, regardless of whether or not you care what the search engines do. A good backlink from a strong relevant site could get you more visitors than a 100 relevant websites could gain for you in the search engine results.