Hyperlinks, or just “links”, are the pathways that lead from one website to another. The Internet was built on this series of interconnections between sites. Links are seen on virtually every page on the Internet, and when clicked by the mouse they send the Internet surfer to another page, either on the same Web site, or on a different Web site entirely.

A link from your page at “mypage.htm” pointing to another page on another website or domain is called an outgoing or – more correctly – an outbound link; the link leads out from your page. When you link to another page of your own site, this link is outbound too, relative to the page on which it is placed.

Link exchange is important because it helps you gain link popularity and Page Rank. The best thing about the link exchange is getting a lot of links pointing into your site. As a result, this will enhance your PR, link popularity, and possibly your traffic. That's why building solid link popularity should become one of the daily tasks of your SEO campaign.

Reciprocal links are not as bad as some people think. If link exchanges are made between sites sharing similar themes and topics, the exchange is beneficial to both sites – these are the best types of recipricol links to seek out. You should try to avoid exchanging links with sites that are not relevant to the themes and topics of your site.

If you submit manually to a search engine, it's clear whether your submission has been accepted: most commonly, you will be shown a message confirming that your page has been queued for crawling, or an error message explaining why it hasn't.

If you are submitting to the crawler based engines with the auto-submission software, sometimes - like in the case of Seo Software - it will give you the opportunity to see the submission result in the report (something like 'OK' or 'Failed') and the real response pages returned by the search engine as well.

• Paid submission budget
• Order of submission to pay-for-performance search engines

There are hundreds of directories on the Web that cover every possible market, offering you valuable opportunities to get your site listed in the crawler-based engines, expose your site to your audience and increase the absolute value of your pages (also known as Google Page Rank). The first (and, if you succeed, maybe the only) directories to get listed in are the Yahoo and DMOZ.

There are other directories such as JoeAnt which can be quite useful also, however, many of them are just not worth the trouble. There's a worthy technique to determine if the directory can help you on your way to top rankings and traffic. When you are considering placement in a directory, check it's "robots.txt" file (which we've covered in the previous section about optimizing the site structure) and look if it allows the major search engines to crawl it. If they don't allow crawlers to go through their directory, it will is useless for you to get listed.