One of the most important and, for the foreseeable future, necessary ways to build traffic to your site is through link building. Link building refers to when other sites link back to content contained on your own, and hence your internet presence and page ranking grows. But how can one build this crucial network?

First and foremost, create content worth linking to in the first place. Feature interesting, exciting, infuriating, or useful content – writing that people want to read. Make your content easy to understand. If you have a blog, post regularly and post topics of maximum appeal, not just what your kids did this morning or what your cat ate for breakfast. Kids are cute, cats are cute, but this won’t provide material for many backlinks.

After you’ve got some great articles and material, it’s time to build. In a perfect world, great writing would build links naturally, but here in the real world this seldom happens. You’re going to have to help things along.

One way to do this is to be generous with your time and (sorry) with your money. You’re going to have to interact with some other sites. Post comments. Make quality contributions – not worthless comments or forum spam – to online forums and make sure your site is mentioned in your signature. Hold contests – contests are great link draws. Everyone wants something for free and the word will spread like wildfire. Offer freebies, such as ebooks. Create giveaways in exchange for feedback and comments.

Another way is to take advantage of social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us. Create an account and start adding links. These links are visible not only to the account holder but to everyone, which can create more traffic and, hopefully, more links. With Google’s mysterious new Vince algorithm, these don’t count as much as they used to, but they certainly don’t hurt.

If all else fails, you can always call in the big guns and hire a link-building service. This takes a bit of the tedium of link building off your back but does, of course, cost money. There are many link-building services, whose rates vary according to the services provided.

In the end, how you build links to your site is up to you. By taking advantage of existing resources, putting in some effort, and giving up some time and money, a site owner should able to build an impressive set of links and raise their page ranking to new heights.