Linking brings qualified prospects to your website, boosts search engine rankings, establishes value and trust in your brand, gives you a competitive advantage and establishes you in the virtual marketplace.

A couple of years ago Link Exchange was quite new and an excellent place for savvy webmasters to exchange quality links with those who were like-minded. Many Link Exchanges, mostly based on the original few, have sprung up promising an unending stream of reciprocal links with as many sites as you dare dream. Theres no problem with this however, link trades, where you put my link on your site and I put your link on my site may be less valuable than a one-way link these days after the Jagger Update.

For Instance getting Inbound links to your site (IBL) has become more important to achieve high rankings in Google than it originally was. You can build and establish one way links from blogs, news sites, directories, ezines, product reviewers, partner sites and so on.

Some of the popular Link Building Methods are listed below -

Link from non commercial sites - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing your site's rankings and are more important than ever.

Article Links - Links from the author by-line or within the article that point back to your site will positively affect your rankings.

Link from established sites - If your site is referred from big behemoth site like Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you did before Jagger.

Avoid Link Farms - Link farms are sites that exist solely to link to other web sites. Google in particular has been known to ban sites found using a link farm, stay away from them.

Relevant Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your website, you may rank better after Jagger.

Use Link Bait - Although the term "link bait" is fairly new, the entire concept of link bait has been around as long as the internet itself. People have been creating controversial, funny, and informative web sites and web site content that others naturally link to.

Post messages on forums - Post messages on related forums , make sure they are readable by seach engine, while some of them have no-index attribute on their page.

Social Sites - Some free host sites also allow you to create pages on their sites which may help leverage the authority of their domains.

Obtain Links from Media Sites - Media sites have large audiences of people looking for information - get coverage and a link to your site. This would not only get a significant spike in traffic to our site but also get a percentage of that audience linking to us because the media site did. Links attract links.

Publish Press Releases - Publish any new event or newly introduced service/product in press releases directories.

Submit Tips - Post quality tips on other web sites in the area of expertise, at the bottom of each tip, include two lines about your products/services, and a link to your website.

Submit Reviews - Review different products or services and post about our good/bad experience with the product, service or company on other sites. eg. 'review', 'price comparison' etc. At the bottom of the review, include a few lines of text about you with a link to your website.

Publish whitepapers - Throughout the whitepaper, include references to our products or services with a link to your website. In addition, make sure you let our readers know they may freely distribute the document. Place a link to your whitepaper on our website to enable our visitors to download it. Submit whitepaper on other sites.

Publish Ebooks - Throughout the e-book, include references to your products or services with a link to your website. In addition, make sure you let your readers know they may freely distribute the ebook. Place a link to your ebook on your website to enable your visitors to download it. Submit ebooks on other sites.

Profile Pages - MSN's Small Business Directory allows you to create a company profile page and get listed in other profile pages.

Good inbound links can always move your page up the ranking ladder and act as new entry points to your site. The best way to carry link building is by obtaining natural links pointing to your site from a variety of related websites, some .org's and .edu's, and from other trusted authority sites.

Always remember what the original purpose for linking was and why it was practiced and why incoming links were, and still are, valued by the Search Engines. A link from a related site is a vote of confidence that they feel their visitors will benefit from your content and hence, evidence that your website is considered to be of value in a specific category. Link popularity is important and link building process needs to be given high priority. A little time spent on Link building today will ensure a good search engine ranking for your site in the future.