Most web developers concentrate on adding large amounts of content to their websites or tweaking their sites Meta content as a means of achieving rank on the major search engines. These techniques should be part of your basic SEO focus and should never be over looked, but one technique that is either last on the SEO list or in many cases forgotten completely is the power and value of backlinks and link exchanges.

Search engines take many factors into account when they rank a website and the top factor with out a doubt is relevancy. The relevancy of your website is not just the content on your pages, but how many other websites consider your content to be of use or value. How do those websites tell the search engines that the content on your site is useful or has value? They link to your site!

If your website sells golf clubs, and doesn't contain one inbound link from a website of a similar type or kind, then your websites over all value or PR will be very low or non-existent. On the other hand, if your website had a high number of inbound or back links then your sites relevancy or PR value would be substantially higher than other websites with fewer incoming links or no incoming links at all.

Is there a difference between having reciprocal links and one way links? In a word, yes. Search engines consider a website that contain only a few one way links to be of higher value than a website that has many reciprocal links. The reason for this distinction is that reciprocal links or link exchanges are only links between two websites that agree to link to one another. These sites do not need content that is relevant to each other; the only requirement is that they maintain their link relationship with one another.

An inbound or one way link is considered by all search engines to be the most powerful or valuable form of linking because a website that creates an inbound link to another site is saying "This website has content that my visitors will find useful or valuable". The most popular question asked when it comes to selecting the right sites for inbound links is; how can I determine that a particular site is best suited to link into my site? There are two things to consider when researching the quality of a site for inbound linking; relevancy and the PR (PageRank) of that site. By using these two requirements in your inbound link research you can always be sure you have found the right site when it comes to one way links.