In the last few years, link building has become more and more important when it comes to search engine optimization. Indeed, it has become a veritable industry of its own. Even Google says, "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages". Effective link building can even help you transfer page rank to your website from the sites that link to yours. The higher the page rank of the websites that link to you, the better.

However, it can be a potentially hazardous practice to pursue. Link building in many cases can be considered a "gray-hat" practice at best, a "black-hat" practice at worst. The best way to build links is to build them naturally. The more helpful and useful your website is to its viewers, the more people and other websites will naturally link back to yours.

The gray area comes in when website owners or optimizers actually go out and attempt to cultivate these links themselves. They could be commenting on other people's blogs or articles, leaving a link as a comment with little or no text with it, giving almost no reason for posting a comment at all. In essence, many people that do this will post a comment that says, "Nice blog post", and then add a link to their website. This practice is widely considered to be an abusive tactic.

There are many other ways to cultivate links, such as link baiting, or by adding your website to legitimate online directories (not link farms or link sharing sites), or joining social networks or social bookmarking websites. These are considered legitimate practices. If you buy links or trade links without the specific purpose of advertising, your website may be in danger of getting penalized or even banned from search engines.

*If you are interested in link building software, I strongly recommend SEO PowerSuite. Read more about it on my SEO Resources page.

Ask questions or post comments here about link building and how it can drastically improve your website search results by cultivating links through white-hat (ethical) SEO tactics.