I have found on various posts & forums, that you may get better ranking when there are few links to your site from other websites, does it make any difference if these are text links or links from images?

Maybe someone can correct me.. but I don't think it would matter, since the search "spider" goes through the site, and I think it would basically just go to any sort of link on the page. :scatter:

Yes!
It does make a difference.
Consider exchanging links to similar themed site's with a good PR(Pagerank) in google.
So your a web hosting company? Then if you want to exchange a link with other sites, Get them to have a text link saying Company Name - Web Hosting or something similar with a few keywords in their, Then they link it through to your site and you do the same for them on your links page.
A web hosting company could indeed link to similar themed sites like web design, internet marketing sites, domain registration sites, other site's that are not necassarily your competitor but you's can work together and compilment each other's sites.
Say i sold wines online then i would want to link to other places online that sell giftbaskets, flowers etc. Or something similar.
Google weighs quite a bit of importance on incoming links to your site.
Exchanging reciprocal links should be part of everyone's core online business model, Unless you already have a strong brand recoginition like nike.com sony.com when people will probably automatically link to them anyway.

quick edit: use text links, as googlebot cant read/crawl images/graphics only their "alt" tags, But less and less relevance is being placed on these as of late because of keyword spamming.

For PageRank (PR) purposes, it wouldn't matter at all. PageRank is simply a formula measuring links; as long as they can be crawled a link is a link. And googlebot certainly can and does crawl image links. Only javascript or cgi-based links would be a problem; some people use those approaches to construct links that they don't want to be crawled.

A good link, if PageRank is the consideration, is a link from a page with good PageRank itself, and with few other outgoing links. PR currently is not "themed," so the topic of the links or the content of the linking page or site doesn't matter.

The content of link anchor text is a valuable on-page consideration, but doesn't make the link any more valuable in the context of Google PageRank.

If you want to look beyond Google, though, theming of links may be a consideration; and it's likely to become part of Google's PR algorithm -- someday. And too often people concentrate too singlemindedly on the search engine significance of links. In many cases on-topic links are more likely to directly bring human visitors than are links from unrelated sites. As to the text link vs. image link question as it relates to traffic, most studies show that text links are more likely to be "clicked" than are image links.

So overall, yes, on-topic text links are probably more valuable than are unrelated image links. As the original question, though, focuses directly on positioning on Google, it makes no difference at all in that context.

""""<a href="https://www.whatever.com"><img src="../images/king.jpg" width="50" height="14" border="0"></a>""""

So it is ok to use this? Im asking this beacuse some of my customers would like to have my "powered by logo" palced on their homepages with a link to my site, and iw as wondering if a simple text link is more valuable :)

My experience with Google shows that reciprocal links have no effects on my ranking on Google. And I'm talking about ranking of between 1-40. I have pages ranked in the top 10 on Google without any external links to it at all (reciprocal or not).

It's all in SEO - (not your common 'run-of-the-mill' optimisation either).

If I'm not wrong, according to google reciprocal links do matter. Maybe your search phase is something unique that people don't put in their meta tags?

No, the search phrases are common terms as they show up in my referer log as being the search terms that visitors found my sites on.

This (my SEO & ranking) is consistence across Google (also Yahoo), AltaVista and sometimes MSN.

Well PageRank is absolutely important to Google, and PageRank means links. But, for PageRank purposes an internal link is no different from an external one. So certainly you can have well-ranked pages that have no external links to them; they are picking up PR through your internal link structure.

And, again, PageRank is only one element. We have many pages with just a moderate PR of 4 or so that rank in the top 10 for competitive terms, outranking pages with higher PageRank on the strength of better on-page optimization.

Meta tag keywords, as mentioned in an earlier post, have no significance at all on Google.