Here in part one of “Linking Practices” I will run through and explain in a little detail.  While each method of linking has its benefits it also often has disadvantages.  More often the advantages outweigh the disadvantages - if done correctly.

Reciprocal Links:
While many believe reciprocal links to be dead, these links have the potential to be either very useful or very useless; it all depends on the source for this one.  A reciprocal link is a link swapped with another website.  While the search engines don’t really give these all that much weight (unless from an authority site) these can be useful in driving traffic to your website from related websites.  With enough of these links each driving small amounts of traffic to your website the increase in traffic can be quite noticeable.

A reciprocal link from an industry leader or a related industry leader can often lead to good volumes of traffic to your website.  The greatest benefit here is that these are visitors that are already interested in your product or service.  The disadvantage of running reciprocal links is that you get the world and his brother wanting to swap links with you, usually with absolutely no relevancy at all.

One Way Links:
These are the most valuable links when considering the search engines.  A “direct “or “one way” link is a link to your website that is not reciprocated.  The reason that this is so much more valuable is because in this case it a website that has linked back to yours without any solicitation (or at least that is how the search engines see it).  The theory behind this and the PageRank algorithm is that every link to a website counts as a vote.  Obviously the more votes you have the move important you site is seen to be.  However it is also believed that every vote that you have to send out weakens your importance.  Kind of like if you had a group of 10 people that all gave you $10, you would be up $100, but if you also had to give out $10 to each of them, then you simply break even.  In the same way, the more votes that you are able to “bank” (not handed back) in this case the better off you are. (more…)

Credit:
Linking Practices – Part 1 of 3: Links Defined

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