Links from and to your website

With Web Design and Developement linking is a very important aspect in Search Engine Optimization . It's not only important to get a lot of inbound links, but outbound links and links within your website are equally important. This section explains the effect of linking.

Getting links

You need links to your website for your website to be found on the internet. Generally another website won't link to yours if that other website gets nothing in return. It may get extra information for it's visitors from your website. Or you have a link to that site on yours in return for his link. Or you pay him for a banner. There are many possibilities, but whatever the reason, you need the links.
Search engines use the amount of links to your website as one of the key factors for a high ranking. A website with a lot of links must be something special if so many sites link to it.
There are many ways to get links to your website, but the cheapest way is to have content that people want to link to. This content also helps you to get listed in directories and industry specific websites.

Links between pages of your website

Pages that don't have links to them are only indexed if you submit them by hand and keep resubmitting them. To prevent this make a good internal link structure and even add a sitemap. If every page in your website links to every other page the optimum result for the entire site is reached, but you can also add importance to pages by directing more links to them. Always have an internal link on every page. External links to your website should target your most important pages. These pages get more points then other pages and rank higher in searh engines.

Links from your website

PageRank explains how linkpoints are divided between every page that is linked to, so keep most links internal. External links make your site loose point, internal links normally don't.
If you add an external link to a page with internal links, the percentage of points given to your internal pages drops.
Be carefull who you link to, if you were to link to a linkfarm some search engines penalize your website for this.

Links to your website

Links into the site from the outside are one way to increase a site's total PageRank. The other is to add more pages. Where the links come from doesn't matter. Google recognizes that a webmaster has no control over other sites linking into a site, and so sites are not penalized because of where the links come from.