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One of the important things you can do to your website is to get links, as links is what allows people to navigate the Web. How do you get links?

Introduction to link building

Fortunately for some, unfortunately for others, there is quite a number of link building strategies, each tactic requiring different efforts and providing different results.

The effort and effectiveness of link building strategies depend on the value you provide during the link building process. One of the most efficient ways to provide value is to create quality content.

Quality content for link building

You can use quality content by:

• having educational, entertaining or otherwise interesting articles or posts on your site or blog (if you design your content to spread via word of mouth, it may generate hundreds of links)
• offering quality articles for publication to established industry journals, newsletters or informational websites in the industry
• guest blogging on blogs you like in the industry
• issuing a press release about a newsworthy event in your company
• participating in established industry forums

Though the list isn't huge, it doesn't mean the results are as small. You simply need to create a lot of quality content, interesting to your readers. If you publish it on your site, you'll be recognized as a quality resource. If you offer it for publication, you'll be viewed upon as an industry expert. Press releases above all allow you to spread the word about your content as well.

The benefits of quality content link building is that you attract targeted audience to your website, position yourself as an expert in the field and obtain natural, relevant links. Of course, this course of action requires some work, but it is well worth it.

If you need more ways of building links, here are a couple of worthy resources:

• "Link building of 2006" by Aaron Wall of www.seobook.com
• Quality link building articles from Eric Ward, the Link Mensch
• "How to increase traffic" from Brian Clark of CopyBlogger

Alternative link building techniques

On the other hand, link building tactics that require little effort, such as directory or bulk article submission, provide little value to the end customer. The search engines know how hard it is to get a link for you and value the link accordingly (a good measure of link quality is the quality of the site it is on and it is harder to get a link on a quality website). You won't get much targeted visitors from websites without moderated content, too.

Summing up

Generally, a good way to build links is to forget you are building links and to start building relationships with your peers, customers, vendors, affiliates, industry journal editors and journalists. This will keep you focused on providing value and you'll simply get traffic and links as a bonus for getting known in the field, which may be worthwhile, as reputation is one of the most valuable assets on the Web.