Link Building – Types of Link Building
Link building is an essential activity to increase the ranking of a web page in search engine results. Links, however, are not equally valuable. Some links are better than others, and some may be worthless. The same kind of link may be useful in one context and not so useful in another. A link that may not be valuable in SEO context may be very helpful in some other manner.
Each website may have different types of links. Here are a few major link types explained:
Traffic generators: these links may not do much for the page ranking but may have the potential to bring in traffic from sites that have a heavy footfall. These could be banner ads, blog comments, forum posts, text links, popular directories and others.
SERP boosters: these links may or may not bring in traffic but help to increase the search engine rankings of the website on result pages. These are generated through keywords that are used as anchor texts. Commonly used in blog comments, guest blogging, forum signatures, directory submissions, etc.
Page Rank Boosters: these are do-follow links from other pages with high page ranks. The page rank of a website is directly proportionate to the page rank of the site the link is directed from. These links can be generated through link requests, blog comments, directory submissions, etc.
Reputation boosters: these links are created to build a personal name or company name as a brand. It helps to bring positive results when the name is Googled. These links are directed not just to the main website but also blogs, social profiles, etc. reputation links are generated through social profiles and directories like Twitter or Twellow.
Backlinks for backlinks: each backlink to a web page can be made more relevant when links are placed on the sites where these incoming links are directed from.
Some other types are:
Authority links: links from reputed and trusted sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc. These links work as SERP boosters, reputation boosters and traffic generators.
Directory links: linking to directories to find niche segments. DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory etc.
Reciprocal links: when two websites exchange links with each other with the aim to benefit from and also help each other.
Press release link: these do nothing much to help your SERPs or page ranks, but any mention is good as it may direct traffic.
Article links: one of the best quality links that a web page can generate. These are the highest quality authority links. Many sites welcome new content (in the form of articles) in exchange for providing back links. The better the site, the higher the quality of article required.