I focus pretty heavily on link building for my websites. It’s not my favorite thing to do, in fact it’s kind of a pain but if you understand the importance of link building for boosting search engine ranking you know it’s a necessary pain 
The search engines are more discriminating about the links they value these days and that means that if you’re going to go to the trouble to build links to your site, here’s how to get the most value for your efforts.
To start with, it helps to understand the two basic, but important, types of links that should be included on your website:
Contextual link: These are the links you see placed in the body of content that you read. Typically these links are placed in such a way that they entice readers to click on them.
Non-Contextual links: These are links that stand alone and are included within any written content. These would be navigational links or perhaps breadcrumb trail links, etc.
Your website needs both types of links. You must have good navigational links (non-contextual links) on each page of your site along with plenty of contextual links to other pages on your site and relevant pages on the web.
But there’s a second even more important part to all this.
You also need to get one-way links coming into your site from other websites. You can get one-way inbound links in two ways, through editorial links or acquired links.
Editorial links are the links that websites get naturally. These are not links that are traded, paid for or asked for. These are one-way inbound links to your content from people who found your content worth linking to.
Acquired links on the other hand are just the opposite. These are links you acquire by either paying for them, article distribution, ads or making comments on blogs and forums.
Both types of links add value to your site but editorial links are the more valuable of the two because they are by definition the links you earn. Of course they are harder to get as well.
So the next logical question is how do you get editorial links?
Unfortunately getting these links won’t happen overnight at first, but there are things you can do to boost your editorial links.
It starts with writing great content. There’s no more magic secret than that. Publishing content that people want to read such as answering a pressing question, solving a specific problem, demonstrating how to do something or is even funny, encourages links.
It’s all about how you can give your readers information they can use. Try making it personal. What have you learned, what have you experienced what have you figured out that someone else might want to know?
You’re probably not going to impress everyone who reads your content with new and earth shattering ideas every time but at least you may be able to present it in such a way that they might take a second look or think about the topic in a different light.
OK, now that you’ve written your content you need to get it out there so readers can start linking to it. So you’ll need to find quality, authority sites that you can comment on or add information to about your content, here are a few things that I do…
It starts with finding good quality, authority sites that I can get the message out to. Finding these sites quickly and easily can be a challenge so I use 5000 backlinks to help me find blogs and forums that I can comment on, answer questions or subscribe to.
Of course remember I said that doing this will bring ‘acquired links’ which still in themselves have value, but if my comments are thought provoking and informative the strategy is a reader might click through to my content which could result in an editorial link.
So the message here is make comments that will encourage a click to your content. Comments like ‘nice post’, ‘thanks for the info’ or something that has poor grammar and can’t be understood won’t get you a click. In fact you risk having them deleted.
Note: when posting comments to blogs, enter the complete link to your content page or blog post in the ‘Website’ section of the comment. Don’t link to your home page.
Next, I submit my content or posts to popular bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Propeller. These sites will rate your content for quality that surfers will see and hopefully link to.
Also to encourage readers to share your content place bookmarking site icons after your content that readers can simply click on if they like what they read. These are votes for your site and great ways for generating editorial links.
I also use social media sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to advise my followers of my content. Not everyone loves Twitter but it’s a pretty good tool for tweeting about your latest blog posts or articles.
If you use WordPress, you can automate your tweets by using the Twitter Tools plug-in. Every time I make a post it tweets the post title automatically on Twitter.
Keep in mind that both editorial and acquired links will bring value to your site but it makes sense that as the search engines focus more and more on bringing quality information to users, they will want to deliver more of the sites that are linked to naturally by others as opposed to sites with acquired links.
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I really love your articles, Ms. Liz.. some clever ideas there. I always check your articles because I always found them relevant and valuable. Thanks.
Social media is now also a form of link building and I must say with the generation we’re in, social media sites are essential means to add quality links to your site. Thanks for posting, very informative and indeed helpful.