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Link Building Best Practices - A Guide to Effective Link Building Methods
By SEOFocused.com (c) 2010

Just to cover the ground, lets go over what link building is
quickly. Link building is the process of building backlinks to
your site. The more backlinks (links from other sites to your
site) a site has, the higher it ranks on the search engines.
Link building therefore is a mission of all money making
webmasters.

Link building methods have changed from time to time and a
specific method that worked yesterday may not work today.
This is due to changes in the industry over time and in
some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has
been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.

It is therefore very important to know which link building
method works today so that you can spend your time in a most
productive way.

There are many link building methods out there today that work
with some working better than others. Below are some of 
today's popular links building methods:

Article Submission

If you are reading this article, then you know that you can
publish your own article in article directories. Not only do you
gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see
bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus.
Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading
your published articles as well.

Article submission is a great way of building backlinks as it
provides you with 100% relevant contextual backlinks that Google
loves.

Directory Submission

Directory submission used to work lot better before, but it is
still a popular link building method that still works if done
properly. How many directories are out there as of this date is
anyone's guess but one thing is certain: that most of the
directories aren't worth submitting to.

Google considers a Yahoo Directory link as a quality backlink so
if you can afford and justify the cost, it is worth submitting
to Yahoo Directory. Yahoo charges $300 for a yearly submission
and there is no guarantee that your site will be approved!

DMOZ is another directory that is worth submitting to and can
provide great benefit in your SEO campaign. It may take months
to get the approval from DMOZ and the chance of getting approved
is pretty slim. A lot of small directories use the DMOZ directory
categories so getting listed with DMOZ would mean getting bonus
listings on many other web directories.

Another good directory to submit to is the BOTW directory that
costs $99 for a yearly submission and $299 for a permanent
listing.

Other than the above, you should look for quality directories
where you can submit your site. You can judge the quality of
the directories by analyzing the number of sites listed, number
of backlinks the directory has, PR, age of the directory, etc.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking worked like charm only a few months ago. If
bookmarked on authority and quality bookmarking sites like Digg,
Mixx, Propeller, etc, then you can still make good use of social
bookmarking. Other than backlinks, social bookmarking also
offers you some bonus traffic depending on where you submit to.
If you can manage to put together or collect a good bookmarking
site list, then social bookmarking can still be a useful link
building method.

Blog Commenting

This is a link building method where lots of spamming has
already been done so to make the best of it, you need to work a
little harder here. It is best to find quality blogs related to
your own category and make on-topic relevant comments. Not only
do your comments add value to the blogpost, you now have a
greater chance of getting your comment approved and your
comments have greater chance of staying on those blogposts.

Press Releases

Submitting to press release sites can get you some backlinks as
well. It is however hard to put together a list of good press
release sites that are worth submitting to. If a good list can
be managed, then this method can offer some quality relevant
backlinks as well.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Pages

There are a lot of quality social media and Web 2.0 sites where
you can publish your articles for backlinks. You should write
articles that are relevant to your site and publish them on
these social media and Web 2.0 sites with your keywords
hyperlinked to your own site. Some of the authority sites are
Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc.

Social media and Web 2.0 links are very popular these days
because they work great. They offer quality, relevant contextual
backlinks that Google and other major search engines love. There
are lots of other link building methods out there, but if you can
utilize the above ones to their fullest potential, there is no
need for any other methods.
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For more information on Link Building (http://www.seofocused.com/)
and to learn on outsourcing your link building campaign, visit the
author's Link Building Service (http://www.seofocused.com/) site.
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