A proven website linking building strategy has shown to be an effective way to create a flow of targeted and qualified traffic to any website regardless of subject. 

Link building involves a few strange terms. The meaning of these is sometimes not clear and can cause confusion and misunderstanding.

Let's look at the terms you need to have some understanding of:

1. Reciprocal linking: This is the simple exchange of links between websites. A site agrees to place a link on one of its pages in exchange for a link from your site. It can be text or a banner/graphic.

2. Themed linking: This is sites similar in subject linking to each other. Also this can cover the internal linking of the pages in your site between each focused subject page - the use of plain HTML text linking between pages is recommended. This makes it easy for the search engines to find the pages.

3. PageRank (PR): This is Google's view of your site in a scale of 0-10. New domains take time to get PR and start off at zero. The PR of a site that wants to exchange links with you needs to be considered.

[Editor's note: Google updates visible PageRank (as viewed in the Google toolbar) only about every three or four months, but real PageRank is updated all the time. So the toolbar can give you a misleading view of a page's PR.]

4. One-way linking: This is the formation of one-way links (no surprise here!) using different methods that will be discussed in future articles.

5. Three-way linking: This is the formation of an understanding between two webmasters. Webmaster "A" owns 2 sites (No.1 and No.2). He links to your site from No.1, and in turn asks you to link to site No. 2.

6. Link farm: This is where your link is placed on many other sites, almost instantly. Normally a paid service,  it is not in any theme and rarely results in any traffic. Effectively it is a tactic to try to fool Google and the other major search engines. Not recommended!

7. Anchor text: This is the HTML text displayed and used in the link to your site, for example "Click here".  It is normally a blue underlined link.

8. Site-wide linking: This is where a webmaster agrees to place a link to your site on every page of his site. Sometimes this can be a reciprocal arrangement.

9. Deep linking: This is the linking to internal pages of a site, normally aimed at a specific keyword and the page is normally in the same theme: for example, domain.com/Extra-Large-Cat-Clothes.htm.

10. Content linking: This is using articles on specific subjects and linking from those articles to your site in the form of a resource box at the end of the article. This can be a good form of one-way linking.

11. Paid text links: This is purchasing links on other sites for the sole purpose of influencing search engine ranking. Google has come out publicly against this and is encouraging webmasters to report any sites doing this.

12. Link exchange directory: A directory of websites set up that all want to exchange links.

13. Social linking: This is links from the new marketing media such as MySpace or social bookmaking sites like Digg.com. A large network of themed bookmarking sites have evolved in 2007.

Various link building strategies will be discussed in future articles.