Link building is a necessary part of website promotion. The only true way to have your website ranking well in the search engines is to build quality backlinks to it.

Sometimes, link building will happen without your direct input. This is when other webmasters or visitors see enough value in your website to link to it from their website or from a blog or forum. That is why you need an authoritative site – to gain natural backlinks.

For the remainder of the time, you need to be conducting regular link building campaigns. There are many ways to go about getting backlinks to your website. This article will cover some of the most effective methods of link building.

Link Directories

Submitting to free link directories is a good way to start your link building efforts. It can start off the process of search engine spidering, but rarely has a big impact on your rankings.

You need to track down the high page rank and high quality directories rather than low quality ones. Sites like DMOZ (which can be hard to get listed on) and Yahoo Directory are considered authority directories. Yahoo costs $199 to list your site, but most webmasters say that the benefits make the cost worthwhile.

Contacting Webmasters

This is the old-fashioned way of building links, but still the best way to get quality links on the sites that you want.

Because webmasters of popular sites receive so many emails requesting link exchanges, you need to make yours stand out.

You can offer them benefits or a premium spot on your site for their link. However, keep in mind that one way links are the best backlinks to get, so offering to send them free content for their site (with your website link inserted) is a better option.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing your link building can have positive and negative effects. If you outsource for $20 then you are going to receive very low quality links that will do more harm than good to your site.

It is only suggested to outsource to trusted, well-known link building individuals or services that do more than just submit your links to directories and spam blogs. A good link builder will cost you money, but it can be well worth it.

Effective Link Structure

Now that you know how some of the places and methods of building links, you need to focus on the links themselves.

Of utmost importance is your anchor link text. That is the text that surrounds your href tags in the HTML and the text that search engines use to give weight to your site from the link.

Mixing up your link text is ideal; so make a list of several keyword phrases that you wish to use as anchor text, ensuring that they include some of your main targeted keywords.

As mentioned, one-way links are the most effective links to build. They are also the hardest quality links to gain, but the benefits outweigh the effort involved in obtaining them. Failing that, reciprocal link building from quality, related and authority websites is well worth pursuing if your site is to rank well in the search engines.