Link building is necessary for the powerful search engine optimization of a website. The quality of link determines the ranking of a website in search engine. But before link building one should be clear about the types of links used in search engine optimization. There are three types of links which are described below:

Which of these links work best for your website and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

One-way links:

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://www.mywebsite.com/ and that page doesn't link back to your website then it's a one-way link from your site to their site.

Reciprocal links:

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you. That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to partner websites that send you traffic in return.

Three-way links:

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don't help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That's why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other. The reason why some people think that reciprocal links don't work is that many webmasters who engage in reciprocal linking don't care about theme but only about the number of links. Unsolicited one-way links are usually from topic-related sites. It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every X, Y and Z then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link. It doesn't matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won't.