Link Building is a painstaking process which is always continuing. To obtain your website high in the rankings you will need to regularly be building backlinks with things such as article submissions, link exchanges, press releases, directory submissions and social networking.

In this guide we will give you a few tips on the best methods to start off with link building.

Link Exchanges
Link Exchanges are a great way to get backlinks to your site from another site with the similar topic. This means that people who are visiting will be looking for a certain type of website which your site will be so they are more than likely to use your website to its full potential rather than browse for a minute and go on.

You may get Link Exchanges by browsing for sites in the identical genre as yours and sending emails to webmasters saying why you think it will help out their site to have reciprocal links on the two sites and will assist generate traffic.

Article Submissions
If you write good quality articles then people will want to read them and if you submit these to Article Directories then people will see how good your content is, and comes again and again to your site to have a look at your other articles.

Ensure that the articles you have a link back to your site with the link text (anchor text) the keywords correlated to your site.

This is now doing 2 things, it is link building and serving with traffic back to your site as soon as people click these links.

Directory Submissions
Submitting to web directories is not at all an ending task although it is probably the single most significant way of link building. Make sure you start submitting your site to directories steadily rather than adding to 500 directories one day and after that not bothering for a month. This is because Google the other search engines will think something fishy is going on if a site abruptly gets 500 backlinks.

The most excellent thing to do is when you do it gradually is to add to say 100 directories to get you started and then each couple of days add to 20 more.

There are a large number of tools on the market for automatic directory submission but the best way is to add these manually because you never recognize what information a "bot" will make use of when it adds your site to all of those directories.

There are some of the best directories under with their PR (Google Page Rank) listed next to them.

http://www.lii.org/ 8
http://www.femina.com 6
http://www.gogreece.com 7
http://www.elib.org/ 5
http://www.dmoz.org 8

Social Networking
Social Networking is a great tool for link building. If you're a user of Facebook or Myspace you will be able to build links back to your site rapidly with bulletins, shared articles and other things to be able to gain large numbers of links and huge amounts of traffic.

If you are a skilled coder you will be able to code something like a Facebook Application which will be able to "give" the Facebook community something in response for your link being on their profile which might then be anything between 1 and 1 million backlinks (Based on how popular the application is)

Social Bookmarking
In addition to Social Networking there is also Social Bookmarking (Confusing, huh?)

This is where you can share your favourite sites with friends also with other internet users which can generate links as well as traffic.

There are lots of places where you can exchange social bookmarks with other people to add that extra link and when done hundreds of times again, build backlinks.

The most famous Social Bookmarking sites are:

http://del.icio.us/ 8
http://www.digg.com/ 8
http://www.diigo.com/ 7

Keep in mind that Link Building is a very essential process so put a couple of hours a week aside to go through and build a few more backlinks or even pay somebody else to execute this for you.