Are Some Links Better And, for that matter, should you focus on sheer quantity of links to your site, or the quality of those links? For our first piece of evidence, let's ask Google.

In a post to their blog in September, we find the following: “By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.”

While that doesn't mean you should engage in the practice of Google Bombing, by any means, it does give you a clue to how effective it can be to use the description of the site that is being linked to, where appropriate.

It isn’t a secret that a sheer volume of links can help you get better rankings. If you could get 25,000 links legitimately referencing your site, sure, that would be a great thing.

When you look at the work involved in the reciprocal link process, even with the powerful tools available on the market today, the objective would be to reduce the amount of time generating links back to your site as much as possible. This makes it seem that it's more important (and more realistic for entrepreneurs and small businesses) to get quality links, if these links are going to carry greater weight than their reciprocal counterparts.

While that goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom about getting better search results, the truth is that search engine optimization is a bit like adjusting the graphic equalizer on your stereo. There are several ways you can adjust your settings to get the desired effect.

In light of that, let's revisit quality link building. What is it?

In general, each link pointing to your site is sort of a "vote" for your sites contest. But all votes aren't equal. If you sell airline tickets on your site, pages that are about travel will get a more powerful vote than a site about butterflies.

And if two pages that have unrelated content link to you, the tie breaker will be the anchor text, or the words in the hyperlink that is linked to you. Nirvana would be an anchor text link on a search-engine favored page that is related to the linked page..

Therefore, a quality link would be the kind of link that carries the most weight in favor of your site. Since their "vote" counts more, you don't need to get as many quality links to get the same effect as pure volume of raw links.

Quality link building, then, is the process by which we discover links that can help us build more valuable document relationships and favor getting these over links that create weak correlations.

The lowest quality link to my site would be a raw link like http://www.freetraffictip.com , on an unrelated page.

A better link would be one that links to me using the phrase free traffic, on an unrelated page. The fact that they use a phrase that is descriptive of my site to link to me, put that link in a better context, so that even when it’s from an unrelated page, it’s even better.

Slightly lovely would be a raw link to my site that was on a page that is related.

The best I'd hope for would be a link that uses the phrase free traffic from a page that has something to do with any topic related to traffic generation.

There are even better scenarios than that, but they are only in play when you’re in control of the link pointing back to you. In the meantime, from watching what Google itself has said about Google Bombing, you can learn that not all links to your site give you the same voting weight.

The question then becomes, why do all that extra work if you can get the same benefit with 25% of the effort?

Why indeed.