WEBSITE LINKING

Website linking is a way of hyper linking to another site. This is a crucial factor in optimizing your website for search engines. Your links determine -most often- how important or rich the content of your site. (Your page ranking especially google).  Linking to different sites increases your ranking in search engines like googles especially when those sites also link back to you and most often have the same category as your site. There exists so many methods of website linking, thus your own discretion is important in obtaining your ranking target using each method. This is because, most search engines especially google have adopted certain procedures to get rid of irrelevant linking

METHODS OF WEBSITE LINKING

Reciprocal Linking
A reciprocal link is a mutual link  between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.

Three way linking
Three way linking (siteA -> siteB -> siteC -> siteA) is a special type of reciprocal linking. The attempt of this link building method is to create more "natural" links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links, which are usually done between two domains.

Automated linking
In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.

Link exchange
An alternative to the automated linking above is a link exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.

One way link
One way link> is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link 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.

An 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. An example of this can be found in this site following this link. This article is written by someone else not linking or affiliated to this site. Most often it is not legal to remove the authors information from their articles hence you get your site being followed by both the sites users and search engines

Multi way linking
Multi way linking is a technique used for website promotion whereby websites may create similar one way links that each involve 3 or more partner sites. This provides each website with a one way non-reciprocal link. This technique has evolved from reciprocal linking, which is a link created between only 2 websites. According to Google and Yahoo, the latest search algorithms have evolved to hold less favor towards websites that a contain a high percentage of reciprocated links, and a higher favor towards websites that maintain a high level of incoming non-reciprocated (one-way) links.

The term multi way simply refers to the fact that the link exchange is between 3 or more websites, however each link is singular by only pointing to one other website. Other means of linking that may increase your web presence may also include other indirect methods such as loading images, videos, content or RSS feeds from a third partners website.

Link campaign

Link campaigns are a form of online marketing and SEO. A business seeking to increase the number of visitors to its web site can ask its strategic partners, professional organizations, chambers of commerce, suppliers, and customers to add links from their web sites. A link campaign may involve mutual links back and forth between related sites, but it doesn't have to require the reciprocation of links.

 Incestuous linking

Incestuous linking is an SEO strategy used by a webmaster to promote a collection of their own web sites, or those of close friends.

Due to the domination of the search engine market by Google, and its underlying PageRank technology, sites are deemed to be more important if they have large numbers of inbound links. If those inbound links are also from highly ranked web sites, they will boost the web site further. With the takeup of blogging and social networking sites such as MySpace, this has resulted in lots of web sites that are inter-linked and can artificially improve the ranking of a web site without merit, i.e. without valuable, or unique content.

When the sites are not directly owned, this is referred to as a web clique.

 Overlinking

Overlinking in a webpage or another hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks.

It is characterized by:

• A large proportion of the words in each sentence being rendered as links.
• Links that have little information content, such as linking on specific years like 1995, or unnecessary linking of common words used in the common way, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context, without any hyperlink help.
• A link for any single term is excessively repeated in the same article. "Excessive" is usually more than one link for the same term in a line or a paragraph, since in this case one or more duplicate links will almost certainly then appear needlessly on the viewer's screen.

 Underlinking

The opposites of overlinking are null linking and underlinking, which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs.  Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time), and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but he or she cannot without an extensive search of the article for a (possibly non-existent) instance of the linked term.

 Free for All linking

A Free For All (FFA) link page is a web page set up ostensibly to improve the search engine placement of a particular web site. Webmasters typically will use software to place a link to their site on hundreds of FFA sites, hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase the ranking of their site in search engines. Experts in SEO techniques do not place much value on FFAs. First, most FFAs only maintain a small number of links for a short time, too short for most search engines to pick up. Second, the high "human" traffic to FFA sites is almost completely other webmasters visiting the site to place their own links manually. Finally, search engine algorithms count more than link numbers, they also check relevancy which the unrelated links on FFA sites do not have. Another drawback to FFAs is the amount of e-mail spam webmasters will receive from members of the FFA. Using an FFA can be considered a form of spamdexing.

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