Prior to the Internet, public relations (PR) firms were the official gatekeepers to journalists, and if you weren't in a position to hire a good PR firm, you'd have a tough time getting your message "out there." Online PR allows you to skip the middleman and share your company's news and information directly with journalists and the general public via online news sources and websites.

One great method of link building is to use link exchanges. This is really not that difficult and it will provide some great links to your site. What you'll need to do is contact people that have similar sites or blogs that revolve around the same topics. This is important because links on sites that are not relevant to your site are not going to help out your site at all. Make sure that you link to the sites you want to link back to you.

Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and squidoo provide users with the ability to create pages in them and therefore one can create a link back to your blog or website. Further, web feed formats such as RSS (Really Simple Syndicate) can be very important link building tool. Here, publishers syndicate the regularly updated RSS which in many instances include news headlines, audio, videos and general texts posted in a standardized format and this is called a feed.

Using a tool like Hootsuite allows users to easily send bookmark links, tweets, or Retweets of great deals. With Google and Bing now indexing Tweets, each of the messages sent out with your product link then building shared incoming links to your products, thus driving traffic to your site. All from the easy use of automatic social media tools.

When the search engines spider the various websites that now have your link, you are credited with having many quality back links to your site, something that goes a long way in determining where your page will rank in their search engine results.

For instance if your site works in a specific industry, be the first to deliver news, tips, and suggestions on particular topics germane to your field. Others in your line of work will link to you from their Web sites when they want to convey the news to their browsers. Similarly having a forum on your website is an effective marketing strategy. People like belonging to a community. People will peruse and link to your main site in conjunction with participating in your community gesture.

Services in link building abound. Avoid being involved in link farms. You will risk losing a great amount of time in keyword research if the search engines reduce the value of your links because of these. A great amount of focus needs to be done in managing and maintaining your link popularity. It would always be wise to think before you leap in link building.

Squidoo is a social media site which allows anyone to build a one page mini site on almost any topic which they call a lens. All you do it to sign up for a free account with Squidoo and you are on your way to build your very first Squidoo lens. Since you are the one who is writing the content of the lens, you can write the content related to the main site you are promoting and from your lens, you have the opportunity to link back to your main site.

Link exchange can be bad for your website and get you banned from Google only if you got too many irrelevant links from poor quality websites. And if you use link exchange, you have to be very selective and be very careful. Finally you can use forums and blogs for your link building. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links.