There are many webmasters that will accept any inbound link in the erroneous belief that it will improve their search engine results and traffic stats. And there are link building companies that service webmasters who are more than happy to take advantage of their "link envy" by using shady or spam like tactics to build those links for them.

Ethical link development is the practice of only seeking out quality long term inbound links in a manner that is beneficial to the website in question and stays within the rules and guidelines set forth by each of the search engines.

Blindly hiring just any company to build links for your website is asking for trouble. Many of the so called link building services out there use a one or more of a combination of actions that can get your site penalized or banned by the search engines.

Practices such as buying links in bulk and reselling them, automated programs that blindly submit your link to thousands of sites with no page rank or who themselves have been banned from the search engines and the practice of submitting to link farms despite its well known negative effects on your search engine rankings.

Any of these practices can be considered spam by the search engines and your websites ranking will dramatically go down even though you are seeing more inbound links.

A truly quality website that prides itself on terrific content should be looking for quality links that can withstand the test of time. In the race for high search engine rankings an important thing to consider in your link building efforts is that quality beats quantity.

Any website should be looking for links that are trusted by the search engines to help organically grow your inbound traffic and search engine rankings over the long term. Manually building links takes time and effort and it is often hard to stay focused especially when there are so many "shortcuts" out there that can supposedly automate the process.

Add to this the fact that it sometimes takes weeks for your inbound links to show any results and it is often easier just to give up.

Outsourcing is definitely an option. If link building isn’t your strong point as a webmaster then hiring an outside link building service can serve you well if you make sure that they do not engage in any of the negative techniques mentioned above.

Be sure that they are manually pursuing inbound links on your behalf in a manner that is consistent with the rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines and that they are building only quality links with a long term positive effect in mind.

Make sure whether you do it yourself or hire an outside company that you set realistic goals early on in your link building campaign and be discriminating when it comes to where you want your inbound links to come from.