When you hear “Link building“, most people automatically think of one website linking to another. Essentially they would be correct, but depending on how the website is linked to the other website defines what type of link it is. Here is a short description of the various types of links you can gain during your link building campaign.

Contextual Links

A contextual link is a click-able piece of text that is placed within content in order to look as natural as possible, the content should be highly relevant to your chosen topic. The text included in the link is generally made up of a keyword phrase in which you are targeting to rank well for in search engines.

Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarks are links from ‘sharing’ sites, similar to Stumbleupon, inbound and Delicious. Bookmark links are stored as a resource, organised and managed online, they are easy to search and share to other internet users. Social bookmarking must not be confused with Social News links, these are links from places like Reddit and Digg and focus on the social bookmarking of news related items such as technology.

Web Directory Links

Web directory links are links that are placed and categorised in an online directory.  The fundamental purpose of a web directory is to link to other websites that are useful and relevant to visitors, however over the past few years this resource service has been abused in the SEO industry by building up unnecessary and unrelated  links, stuffing keywords in directories in order to improve rankings.

Authority links

An authority link is a back link from a site that is already trusted by a search engine. This means that the majority of people visiting the site trust the information on that site. Examples of authority websites include Wikipedia or a government site. .gov and .edu sites are often considered as ‘authority’ websites.

Reciprocal links

A reciprocal link is a link agreement between two websites and their webmasters. This is done to provide visitors with quick access to related websites or to show a relationship or partnership between two sites. Nowadays reciprocal linking (for SEO) is seen to be ineffective, but done in the correct way and by linking to the right sites, you can gain authority and traffic.

Comment and Profile Links

Comments links are text links placed within a comment submitted on a blog article. It is an effective method of link building if you comment with a useful and readable response and provide a link to a website that is relevant. Again this method can be abused by spammers, randomly spamming comment boxes with irrelevant gobbledygook. It is most effective if you comment on blogs that are maintained on regular basis. Profile links work in the sense that you place a link on a  profile page of a forum or social media site that is indexable.

Press release links

A press release link is a text link building technique that involves placing a link within a news/informative based article. These publications are dependent on distributing content virally on highly exposed websites, blogs and search engines in a short period of time. Generally the article will stick around but get buried deep in an archive, the content will become less fresh and useful but the link will still exist and will remain available for long tail search queries.