The best scenario is to have inbound one-way links to your site. Those type of links show that you have something that another site found of value to link to you without having to agree to exchange links.

Exchanging links is a good thing, but only if it makes sense for both sites. Certainly competitors won’t want to exchange links. Nor would those who have a gift basket site want to link to an industrial components site. Two different markets there. Many think link exchanges are the end-all-be all to getting high search engine rankings. Not the case. Link exchanges pretty much cancel each other out and have no effect.

In addition, you need to make sure that you are linking to a credible site that is of a quality that earns your recommendation. See, when linking to a site you are basically giving a recommendation to your site visitors about the site you are linking to. Forget about linking to your best friend’s poorly developed site. This is business and you are judged by the company and the links you keep.

Be very leery of linking circles, link farms and pretty much anything that makes it sound like getting a bunch-o-links very quickly is a good thing. It isn’t. When sites participate in such programs including buying links, those links are ignored or in some cases penalized. The search engines are wise to most practices of artificially gaining links specifically to affect search engine rankings and they don’t look rank highly sites that use them.

So we’re back to square one. Create a valuable content rich site worth linking to and the links will happen. I have an article about the Reality of Linking, why not check it out?

At your service,
Judith