Link Building

As an ethical white hat SEO technique, link building can be effective in increasing your website's PageRank (and thereby increasing traffic). Link building is the practice of obtaining inbound links to your site from other websites. It should not be confused with Link farming or Link spam, which are considered unethical SEO practices.

You can do Link building in a variety of ways, including responsible link trading, link directories, writing press releases, requesting links from other websites, and paying for links (including online advertising such as AdWords). Link building may also involve building blogs and utilizing social networking sites like My Space, Facebook, or Twitter. Link building is a way of creating viral advertising. It can spread like a virus, and if it's people saying your restaurant has incredible sushi, that's a good thing.

Not all links are of equal importance or value. Some links are not as helpful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as others. Search engines usually pay much less attention to outbound links than inbound links. But even inbound links vary in quality and effectiveness, as far as SEO is concerned.

When link building, be careful, however. Link schemes and link trading hubs should be avoided, as they can get your website banned. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines caution against excessive link exchanging, link farms, and link schemes that manipulate a search engine into ranking a web site as more popular than it really is.

When it is done ethically, Link building is tedious and time consuming. It can also be confusing, since not all ranks help with SEO. However, link building is also one of the best ways to boost website traffic and raise your website on search engine results listings. Many SEO experts hope for the day when search engines will not use link popularity to determine PageRank. However, that day has not come yet, so it's wise to pay attention to Link building.

Link building is effective in increasing website traffic in two ways: first, by directly bringing in new click-through traffic from external websites, and second, by increasing your site's link popularity (a SEO technique that results in search engines ranking you higher on search results pages, which gets you noticed by more people, and thereby increases website traffic).

As you go about building links to your website, keep these two goals of increasing click-through traffic and SEO in mind, because some link building techniques will bring in lots of traffic from external websites but aren't good at increasing link popularity (they aren't good for SEO), and vice versa. For the long term success of your website, you need some links that are good for SEO and some links that bring in immediate traffic. Links that come from related websites help with SEO more than links from irrelevant websites or companies in totally different industries. The ranking of the external website linking to yours also plays a factor in how much a link helps in terms of SEO. Some links do not affect PageRank at all.