Most sites have a links page - why? Well, there are two very important reasons why a web developer should consider having a links page.

1 Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is only one way of getting the search engines to pick up that you are there. Something else that you must not neglect if you want your website to be noticed is obtaining links.

2 Your website is offering a service to your visitors - links provide them with other sites of interest which they may want to visit. Although the retail industry might say they want people to stay on their site, rather than going anywhere else, carefully chosen links may be able to get people even more interested in the product you are selling! You may have to think laterally!

In the eyes of a search engine there definitely seem to be good links and bad links. Good links will get you higher up the page rankings and onto the top of the listings, bad links at best will be ignored and at worst could actually could against you and your site be listed much lower.

- A good link is one from a site which has high relevance to yours, and which is has a good page rank.

- A bad link is one from an obvious link farm, and has no contextual links to your sites.

Before we go further, lets talk a little bit about page rank. Page rank is the ranking that Google gives to website pages and shows their importance as Google sees it. The Google Toolbar, which can be obtained from http://toolbar.google.com for free, is a useful tool as it can display the page rank of any web page you are looking at. The page rank (or PR) of a site ranges from 0 to 10 - 0 is where you start, 10 would be exceptional! Although Google keeps the algorithms for working out PR very close to their chests, the progression through the numbers is probably on a logarithmic scale - that is, a site ranking 2 is many times more important than that ranking 1, not just 1 point.

When you are link building you should be trying to get links to your site from sites with a higher page rank than yours. Links from sites with good PR will immediately signal to the search engines that yours is a site worth indexing! The more links the better!

So should you only link with sites with higher PR? Well, if everyone practised this the chances of you getting any links for your embryonic site would be zero! A site may be 0 today, but that site may also be working hard to increase its rankings and you may benefit from their progress. Also, do remember your human visitors, a site may be useful to them, even if not for your purpose of increasing your rankings! So golden rules to remember: