Link building is an important part of SEO, and is becoming increasingly difficult as Google looks to minimise spam and maximise quality. One way to ensure your website thrives over others is to build a diverse and varied back link profile.
Here are a selection of different types of links, can you think of any others?
Miscellaneous Links:
There many types of links ones I couldn't classify include links are found on private blogs, links from resource pages, university links, link exchange pages, links found in the footer and/or sidebar of private websites and referral links. These often make up the majority of the links pointing to a website. These ‘other’ types of links build up over time, giving the site more authority and value in the eyes of the search engines.
Internal Links:
Links created internally to connect pages within a site. These links are important as they facilitate the user navigation of a site. A limit should be placed on how many internal links each single page of a website has, typically less than 100.
Affiliate Links:
Links created from partner sites are called affiliate links, these links are from another website owned or partnering with the same company.
Article Links:
Articles are a good medium for advertisement and are used to drive traffic. Articles deliver a long term benefit with permanent backlinks which can grow naturally when content is re-published.
News Article Links:
These link are built naturally when a company is mentioned in the news. These links can be of great value, especially when they come from authority sites such as the bbc.co.uk which has a domain authority of 100.
Wiki Article:
Wiki sites such as Wikepedia, which is the 4th most visited website in the world (Source: Alexa.com), are considered high authority sites and are used to create quality backlinks and drive traffic.
Directory Links:
Directories are the places where people go to look for websites in specific sectors, they are popular in the online world. Directories must be carefully selected to offer SEO benefit as many have been abused in the past.
Press Release Links:
A well written Press Release can be a good source of authority backlinks and traffic.
Foreign Site Links:
Foreign links are links which come from websites which are not written in English. The benefit of having a foreign site link is it makes your backlink profile more diverse. The problem with this type of link is a foreign site could be poor quality or spam and this can have a negative effect on the sites linked to.
Forum Posts:
Forums are a good source of backlinks, especially when the forum is related because it helps Google create an association between the forum subject and the site. Forums are also a good source of relevant traffic and the visitor is more likely to convert.
Social Bookmark Links:
This is a link from a site like Digg, or StumbleUpon where you bookmark the page for others to find.
Social Media Links:
Social links are links from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, they are good for traffic and also get pages ranking well if the links are re-published a high number of times.
Image Links:
Image links are backlinks from an image as opposed to text. These are sometimes sponsored or paid for links, but not always. Google will often pick up images and show them in the Google Images part of the search engine so they can be a good source for backlinks and traffic.
