How important is Link Building
to optimize your website for search engines? Very very important. This technique
will help you improve your website's page rank and also get free flowing traffic.
It is also very important that the "quality" of incoming links to your site is
good.

1> Quality Web directory submissions:

Submitting
your website to quality search engine friendly web directories will significantly
improve your website's page rank. More incoming links to your site, the better.
Also very important is the quality of incoming links. What I mean is: Make sure
you submit to good web directories which are indexed in Google(a page rank of
at least one) or other major search engines. Avoid links to web spammers or "bad
neighborhoods" on the web. This will adversely affect your page rank by linking

to those links.

Equally important is that your website should be listed
in the most appropriate category
. Eg: If your site offers help on legal
advice, you can submit your site to the most appropriate category. Your site will
be listed in these webdirectories along with your competitors. But this will be
good, since search engines will try to match the incoming link's category with
your site's service. It it matches, a better rank is given to your site.

Also
important is that the link name or anchor text to your site in the web directory
should be appropriate. Eg: If your site offers legal help, the link name in the
webdirectory page should contain the words "Legal help". This will also help improve
your site's ranking.

There are free as well as paid web directories.

There are many free quality web directories like www.webdirectoryone.com or paid
directories like yahoo web directory. Adding to high quality paid directories
like yahoo directory is worth the price.

2> Social bookmarking

Sites
such as del.icio.us, furl.net, blinklist.com can provide an excellent source of
quality incoming links to your website. Social bookmarking is a way of of saving
the address of a website you want to visit in the future. These social bookmark
web sites let you create an online public space to add your bookmarks and also
lets you share with other surfers. These social bookmark sites have high PageRank
and are frequently visisted by search engine spiders. If you take a closer look:

• These bookmark links are one way links from high PR sites
• Has
  
  keywords of your choice in the anchor text or link name

These 2 factors
can help your site increase it's link popularity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas George is a lead SEO specialist of mysiteonweb.com, an Internet company that specializes in helping small businesses create their own websites as well offers cheap domain names. He also owns templatesonweb.com that sells premium quality website templates.