Any SEO campaign is just impossible without a strong link building tactic. If you think about the structure of a successful optimization strategy, link building is the backbone of it. Here's the second part of my article on the 12 effective ways to build quality incoming links to your website.

6. Participate in Forums and Discussion Groups

Most forums out there allow you to put a link to your website in your signature which gives you another effective way to build links. Just make sure you don't make the same mistake a lot of website promoters seem to be falling into: don't post just to get a link. That means you don't just drop into every single thread with a 'me too' post or start tons of 'hey guys, check out my sweet website' topics in every forum you come across.

Try focusing on the forums you can get some valuable info from and have something to give back to the community. Answer questions, share some interesting and useful information. This way the links you drop in your sigs won't just hang there giving you a pure SEO effect (which is rather small) but you'll also see a substantial flow of traffic and if your website happens to be just as valuable as your forum post, people will end up linking to your website.

7. Create Great Content and Let People Know About It

I'm sure you've seen this link building tip tons of times. However, a lot of people supporting it somehow stop half way telling you just to create outstanding content. But that's just a part of the job and although it's the main part, you still need to spread the word about the work you've done. Once you've written a great blog post or article on some topic that you believe will resonate with people and spark their interest you need to tell the world about it.

Go to blogs and websites that have similar or related posts and tell how you agree, disagree or complement the points made there in your article. Whenever someone asks a question that is answered by your blogpost, give a short summary answer and drop a link. Submit your story to social bookmarking sites, and if your content is really worthy people will notice it and link to it.

8. Fix existing links

Some sites maybe linking to the pages of your website that don't exist. You can find these links with the help of Google Webmaster Tools and ask the people linking to you to change the anchor URLs to the actual pages of your website or 301 redirect the links. This way you'll not only get the credit for the links from the search engines but will also tap into the visitors that were led to 404 error pages instead of your website.

9. Exchange Links

This is the old proven method of to build links to your website. Find relevant websites that are indexed and (preferably) well ranked by the search engines and offer them to exchange links with you. Sounds easy isn't it? However, alongside with getting reciprocal links you need to make sure they stay in place, which is a very time consuming task. Good news you can save a lot of time on finding link partners and maintaining your links by using quality link building tools.

10. Hold Contests

People get excited about contests in every possible way: we like to participate in them, we like to win them and we like to tell others about them, which online means linking to them. Think of a contest you'd like to jump into and create one, if it resonates with more of us, you'll get a lot of top quality links.

11. Give Away Freebies

Yep, we like stuff, especially, we like free stuff. If you have something to give away be it a product, free wordpress template or simply valuable information, just share it with others and the links will follow.

12. Think a Step Ahead

In every industry there are certain events that happen on a regular basis and draw a lot of attention. Prepare for these events beforehand and start covering them on your website or blog before everybody else does. This way early searchers interested in the event will come to your website and a lot of people will link to you as the first to deliver information on the topic.

Hope these techniques will work for you helping you achieve higher search engine rankings. Find out more about link building to ensure strong and lasting SEO success for your website.