Two of the biggest search engines, Google and Yahoo, place a huge importance on one way links to determine their search engine rankings (SER). Each link to your hub is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank in the SER's.

in this hub we will be sharing with you some pretty good information on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building to your hub.

Understand the fundamentals

Beginning with the basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage or hub to another. An ‘internal link' is a link within the same website. An ‘external link' takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The term ‘backlink' means when another website links to yours.

• URL Link

This is simply a website url that is a link.

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub

• Text Links (aka static links)

This is the most common type of link and looks

like this: text link

The html code for a standard text link:

<a href=”http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub”>HubPages Website about links</a>

• Image Links

An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

The html code for a standard image link:

<a href=”http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub”><img src=”http://www.website.com/image-name.jpg”></a>

(in the above code notice the “.jpg”, this is the type of image, that could also be “.gif”, “.bmp”, etc.)

• Dynamic Links

These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.

Examples of basic ‘dynamic links’:

<span onclick=”window.location=‘http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub’ “>text you can see on hub page</span>

<a href=“javascript:window.location=‘http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub’ “>How-to-Start-to-Build-Links-to-Your-Hub</a>

It is good to be able to recognise these types of links, even if you are not conversant with web design and programming. You don’t have to know the codes, just how to identify each type of link.

Links provide navigation for human visitors and for ‘spiders’ from the search engines. Basically a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information for the search engines. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website and hubs. This means that they gather information about your hub in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders indexes your hub, they follow the links to get from one webpage or hub to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.

Example:

<a href=http://www.hubpages.com rel=”nofollow”>Hub Pages</a>

The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Simply put, meta tags are information that is for the spiders only and is not seen by human visitors. You can see the code for any website or hub in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

Example of ‘no follow’ in the meta tags:

<META NAME=”Robots” CONTENT=”No Follow”>

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to your hub, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

• One-way links - A one-way link is when another website links to your hub and you don’t link back to them.
• Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website links to your hub and you link back to them.

One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your hub, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, and plenty more minutae etc.

Basically, the more websites and other hubs that link to your hub the better. However, building links to your hub takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a larger return on your time investment. 20 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine viewpoint than 200 ‘low quality links’.

(it’s important to know that you can get links that have ‘no value’ in the eyes of the search engines, but they bring you hundreds or thousands of visitors.)

• Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 500 links from sites with no PR. (see my hub on PageRank)

• Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. See side bar video from Matt Cutts!). Especially be careful about Site Wide links. If your hub only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.
• Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.
• Make sure the links you get are worth something, don’t get “No-Follow” links.