Link Building is a strategy used to improve a website’s credibility within search engines. Successful link building can be achieved by a number of different methods. These methods are essential to increasing visibility in major search engines and driving more traffic to your website. Here are some of the more successful approaches for building links to your site:

Submit to a Directory
A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web that categorizes links to different websites, listing sites by category or subcategory. There are both free and paid directories available, and both are very helpful in the link building process. It is usually a good idea to submit your site to a combination of niche and general directories. Niche directories are those that include listings of websites in a specific industry: research those in your industry using a search engine.
Popular Directories Include:
• Yahoo – Most respected directory
• DMOZ – Popular, public edited directory
• Business.com – B2B, highly respected directory

Relevant Information Endorsement
External links build a site’s authority among search engines, thus improving search engine rankings. From a user experience standpoint, external links connect from one website to another website, allowing visitors to move directly to a different website. Search engines treat these links as endorsements or “votes” for the receiving site. The key to link building is finding the most relevant and respected web sites to which you can link.

Social Media Links Social media is essential in a successful SEO campaign. Social media helps to create link popularity, a crucial factor in receiving high rankings. Another form of social media is the ‘no-follow’ tag attribute, which was introduced by Google in January 2005. Websites can nullify link value by adding ‘no-follow’ attributes to links in order to stop link farming and spamming on websites and forums. No Follow tags won’t directly count toward a site’s link count, but will drive traffic and potentially influence users to link to the site from their own, thus indirectly increasing link count.
Social Media Sites:
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Digg

Links in Press Releases Links in online press releases get shared fast by aggregators such as Google News, Google Search, Yahoo News, MSN, Ask News, and other RSS feeds. The payback of fast distribution in press releases, and their embedded links, is that they will remain accessible in the archives of newswire services for years. Search engine ranking algorithms take into account the maturity and PageRank of pages that point to your website. Therefore, your linked web pages will rank better over time as the release obtains more visibility.
Popular Internet Press Release Distribution Services Include:
• PRWeb (Offers SEO functionality)
• PR Leap
• I-Newswire
• 24-7 Press Release
• PR.com
• PR Zoom

Next Steps One way to start on your link building is by assembling partnerships and sponsorships with organizations that will link to your site and vice versa. Currently, many companies are using this approach as it appears to be successful within their SEO campaigns. There are also various ways to track link building efforts by using some helpful tools. For example, using Google Webmaster tools will help you discover your links and examine how users are reaching your site. This is a free tool offered by Google and is a great way to track your links.

Overall, there are many ways to achieve successful link building for your website and many tools to help you in the process. Whether you do the work yourself or hire an SEO firm to do it for you, there is no easy road to success- all of these linking strategies take time and effort!