It is true that the more incoming links a site has, the higher it will rank in terms of its relevant keywords. This is especially true for the Search Engine Giant, Google. Besides inbound links, cross-links and outbound links also help in Search Engine Optimization as these forms the crucial part of the linking strategy.

Of all the three different types of linking strategies, inbound links are the important and should be evaluated carefully so as to optimize a site. Google takes into consideration the weight of every incoming links and allocate some Page Rank to the receiving page. Therefore, to make a page seems important to Google, it is advised to have more quality sites linking to our pages.

Anchor text is another critical factor when obtaining inbound links from the other sites. Anchor texts with ‘click here’ will not help much for Google in determining our page relevancy. Instead, you should always encourage incoming links to contain keywords that you are targeting. For example, a SEO site may have incoming anchor texts like 'SEO Tools' or 'SEO Articles'.

Google is capable of determining whether both linking pages are relevant. They consider links that are content-related as Natural Links. This is reasonable, as it makes no sense in linking an online casino with a government hospital site. Google will reduce the ranking of those pages that contain unnatural links eventually.

Having a well-structured linking system within a site is also important as it allows Google bots to access every page of our site. These cross-links have several advantages to a site because it can distribute Page Rank and help the search engine to determine the pages’ relevancy by looking at their anchor text.

Although cross-links are very beneficial to a site, we must always remember to keep the total amount of links on a page to fewer than 100 as advised by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Pages with more than 100 of links may cause Google to classify them as Links Farm.

It may seems that outbound links do not have any effect on our site ranking as it directs the visitors away from our site but this linking strategy will help in building up our reputation. It is important especially for a content site to provide as much information as possible to the visitors.

Outbound links will not cause the page’s Page Rank to leak out. Therefore, sharing of other important sites and resources will benefit the site in the long run.

A site without links is like an isolated data center. In order to make our sites known to more users, links are important and should be carefully implemented throughout the whole site and eventually, the Internet.