When looking into relationships between websites, there are three types of links.

One-way incoming links

Also known as ‘inbound link’ are links leading in to your site from other sites. Incoming links are the best types of link to get, from a marketing point of view, since they’re offering you something for nothing in the form of free traffic and a boost in the search engines! Sites with a large number of relevant, on-topic incoming links are sometimes referred to as hub sites.

One-way outgoing links

Also known as ‘outbound links’ are links on your own site which connect to other sites i.e. links that will lead your visitors away from your own site. From a marketing perspective, outgoing links may be considered the weakest type of link as you are effectively giving away your traffic. On the other hand, if your site is very useful, your visitors may well come back again - and they will appreciate your site even more for its willingness to point them to other relevant resources. Sites with a lot of on-topic outgoing links are sometimes referred to as authority sites.

Two-way reciprocal links

These are circular link relationships, i.e. your site links out to a 3rd party site, and that site links back to yours. The links might be homepage to homepage, linkpage to homepage or linkpage to linkpage, depending on the arrangement, but they’re essentially a link swap. Reciprocal links can be beneficial when you’re trying to market your site, especially if they are set up between complementary sites, but their value is dropping as the search engines tend to discount such "mutual admiration" relationships.

Use a keyword in your anchor text

When creating a link, make sure you use your keywords in your hyperlink. For example, I am running a competition on Crush Calculator, where you stand a chance to win an Apple iPod Touch. As you can see, I have included the exact words I want associated with my competition. This tactic will influence your rankings in search engines relative to the searching of these key words.

Link from relevant pages

When linking to a website, if the link containing page is relevant to the destination website, the ranking will be treated better than a link which points to an irrelevant website. It makes sense though and shows just how intelligent these search engines are!

Link to relevant pages on your site.

Having incoming to your website is great an all, but having links from external sites pointing to relevant pages on your site will increase your rankings. If the link text is "win an Apple iPod Touch " then you should make sure that the link goes to a page that has the competition. If the link text matches the content of the linked pages then it’s more likely that your website is really relevant to that term and it’s more likely that you’ll get high rankings for that search term. This is not the only benefit, this will also increase your users visiting pleasure.

It’s good if the link is from an authority site

Technorati gives websites authority ratings and having links coming from websites with high authorities will benefit your page rank. So having thousands of links from very low authority websites will not jump your page rank up a lot, rather take your time to get a link back from a website with a high authority.

The link must not have a nofollow attribute

The new attribute is called "nofollow" with rel="nofollow" being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner. This seems to be the next big thing circulating the Internet. You can read more here.

Hello guys and girls,

I am currently running a competition over at Crush Calculator, where I am giving away an iPod Touch. The competition is straight forward, just complete the simple form and submit it, that’s all there is to it - stand a chance to win an iPod Touch!

Why? Well, the Crush Calculator website has been such a fun experiment for me and I have learnt a lot from it. I was sponsored the iPod Touch and I, personally, have no use for the thing, so I figured I might as well give it away, but try and gain something else from it, in this case, some more awareness about Crush Calculator.

Click here, head on over and enter the competition. Entries close on 21st December 2007, perfect time for Christmas!

Wordpress 2.3.1 is finally here! Version 2.3.1 is the bug fix and security update for Wordpress 2.3. There is a collection of about 20 bug fixes, which this update will fix, if you are interested, you can have a look here.

Some of the most important fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

It was a pity to see that there was an XSS security floor with 2.3, but it’s a simple process to sort things out. You may download Wordpress 2.3.1, and the installation documentation is available too. For those who installed Wordpress 2.3 and would just like to upgrade, there is an excellent guide too.

The release of Wordpress 2.3 saw five main features:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

All-in-all, the new framework is running smoothly as far as I’m concerned and am trying my best to explore it already!