So you want to get your site ranked highly by search engines and you know that one good way to help your site to get there is to build links. What you may not know is that not all links are created equal. Keep reading for a full explanation and some help in planning your link building campaign.
Some links are more valuable to you for site rankings than others, and certain categories of links can even take your sites rankings down. Rather than navigate the mine field and find a mine by stepping onto it yourself, let's see if we can’t whip out the metal detectors and create a map of the landscape of link building.
Step One: the types of links
When it comes to links there are a few different types, some which you may be aware of and others to which you probably have not given a lot of consideration, so before we start talking about the types of links you want and the ones you don’t, let's get a little glossary going. This will help us to be sure we are all on the same page here.
Outbound links
Outbound links are the ones that you have on your site which lead to other sites. For example, if you were writing about taxes and you linked to the IRS site so your readers can access forms or get more detailed information about a topic, that would be an outbound link from your site.
Inbound links
An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. To give you an idea, if you have a friend who has a site of their own, and they find a useful article or page on your site and link to it, this is an inbound link.
The grey area
Now what if in one section of your site you link to another section of your own site; is that an inbound link or an outbound link? Well, it depends. Most sites count it as an outbound link, otherwise you would get inbound link credit from yourself, which isn’t really that accurate. To be honest, some search engines will not count them at all, so only use them when they are necessary.
Link Trading 
