Link Building Strategies to Increase SE Ranking and Traffic

Having link building strategy is critical to search engine rankings and, when done properly, equally important for the traffic they bring.

Site Architecture: Building your Internal Links.

The most important thing you must understand before implementing inbound link building strategies is that search engines treats every page as a separate entity. What this means is that internal links do count. In fact search engines make no difference between internal links and links from other sites.

From a link popularity point of view there are two things you need to be concerned with your internal site links. The first, you should use internal site links do distribute PageRank from your index page to sub-pages and vice versa. The second is that the text inside the links is extremely important and benefit that your pages receives from an incoming link is highly dependent on the context of that link.

Remember the internal linking text is absolutely under your control so you should build keyword rich internal links. Furthermore, keyword rich text is more attractive to humans.

Inbound Link Building Strategies You can Implement.

Here are some strategies you can implement that will increase your link popularity and get you some of the high quality links you seek.

Make sure you are listed in important directories. This is very important if you launched a new site or have a site with no inbound links. A good way to start is to get listed in as many directories as you can. But avoid link farms. Most search engines consider link farming as a form of spam and are beginning to penalize or even banish for link farming.
Reciprocal link exchange involves finding web sites in your niche, building a link to them, and asking for a link in return. While sites going to build reciprocal link exchange may have only a quiet amount of traffic, cross linking between similar complementary websites provides contextual links that can help you rank higher in the keywords important to you, thanks to the link popularity.
One of the best ways to get links to your website is to give away an article that other sites can use for free in their newsletters and on their website. All you ask is that they retain your name, the copyright information, and a link to your site. Remember to use keywords in the hyperlink back to your site. To do this well you need some writing skills and a good idea of the kind of content that people in your field are looking for. Use keyword research and PPC bid management tools to get ideas for fresh pages.
If you own a merchant site, one way to get people to link to you is to pay them to do so. This is commonly done with an affiliate program through which you pays an affiliate a percentage of the sale - but only when a sale takes place. Affiliate programs are important in their own right as a way to generate traffic. But from a purely link building strategy point of view, an affiliate link only helps link popularity if it points to your own domain.
There is no substitute for lots of great content pages on your site. The more helpful content you have, the more others webmasters will be motivated to link to your site.

That is pretty much how you execute a link building strategy. Of course, a year or two from now search engines will have evolved some more, and new recommendations will be appropriate at that point. But a bundle of key links to your site will always be in style.

How to Compare Your Link Building Effectiveness vs. Competitors.

The best way to check who are linking to your website is to analyze your site's activity logs, but usually this method is not allowed for your competitors sites. Fortunately, major search engines provides a way to track down referral links to any web site. A query for all Google, Yahoo and MSN to check links for particular URL is similar:

link:http://www.domain.com/path/to/webpage.html - in Yahoo and MSN this will result a complete list of incoming links to the page. Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query and usually shows links from pages with PageRank 4 or greater.

To count out pages links from within site to each other use the -site operator, such as:

link:http://www.domain.com/path/to/webpage.html -site:www.domain.com (only for Yahoo! and MSN, not Google).