Link building is an essential and a widely used activity in search engine optimization (SEO). It involves the generation of links, whether through, but not limited to, blog and forum posting and directory submission. SEO services are usually sought by website owners to increase the popularity of their websites on the Internet. The establishment of several inbound links leading to your main website helps your pages rank higher in search engines, depending on the keywords you are optimizing for. One-way links are much more help in boosting your page rank than reciprocal or multi-way links.

A website's targeted traffic is a main consideration before starting link-building activities. It determines where you want to place the links leading to your website to ensure that you will fetch users that are highly interested in your products or services. The more relevant traffic you drive in, the more chances of your profit increasing.

The most effective method of link building is by establishing one-way links directing to your website, as SEO experts say. It is an inbound link pointing only to one direction and it is given the highest recognition by search engine bots in defining the relevance of your pages. One-way links could be built by sending articles related to your site to article directories and content sites, many of which could be found online. Such sites usually have a resource box, where you can type in the link pointing to the resource website.

Another method of link building is through multi-way linking, which entails the creation of several non-reciprocal links among at least three partner websites. The links only go one-way. Other ways of building links include posting videos, images, o RSS feeds on your partner sites.

A website owner could embark on a link campaign with the help of professional SEO services. Such companies offer to do your link building campaign for you at specific rates. Professional link-building services usually offer to increase the relevance of your web pages through planting relevant and permanent inbound links pointing to your website.

Their activities include submission of articles to directory listings, submission to sites with high PR links, distribution of articles to article and blog sites, and social network listing. The main goal of link building is to help you reach your marketing goals by driving your targeted traffic back to your main website and allowing them to convert or take the course of action most profitable to your business.

This means that your inbound links should be placed in sites related to yours, sites that preferably have high PR links. Most link-building services usually promise positive results for your online presence within 90 days at the most.

Website owners should, however, be warned to avoid overlinking, which means having too many hyperlinks. Search engine bots for main search engines such as Google and Yahoo re capable of recognizing whether or not certain links are relevant. They "sense" excessive links on a page and disregard them in determining your page rank.