At an elementary level, link building is the first steps of the search engine optimisation (SEO) process. SEO is the task of organically increasing the search ranking of a website to increase traffic and increase sales or exposure. Link building remains a fundamental part of SEO, since Google, Yahoo and other search engines use back links as one of the factors in the complex search algorithms that determined the web site's ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). Listed below are four points to keep in mind while building links for a website.

#1 Relevant and varied Anchor Text

Hyper linking text from one web page to another involves use of the anchor tag. By choosing the right text for a link, the potential to supply valuable keywords to the search engine increases. The benefit of this is two-fold. Not only does the targeted website receive a better ranking, but the web page containing this link has its relevance increased as well. Varying the anchor text is also important across the same page; choose different sets of keywords to prevent the links from appearing as artificial.

#2 Reciprocal Link Exchange

A link swap or link exchange may often appear to be the best way to go about link building. A mutually beneficial exchange of inbound links seems harmless enough. It is prudent, however, to choose the exchange partner carefully. Links from a blacklisted site may very well damage your reputation and ranking. It is not advisable to hand out links to sites whose content varies greatly from yours and vice-versa.

#3 Deep Internal Links

Internal links within a webpage are often ignored by SEO developers. With any moderate sized web site, getting search engines to index every page is tricky. A site map as well as external links to a deeply embedded page can tremendously enhance a web site's search engine ranking.

#4 Directory submissions

While some directories like Yahoo can be expensive, there exist many free online directories that have the potential to generate tremendous exposure for a web site. The listing process is long, but the effort is certainly worthwhile. All manually submitted content is reviewed and these directories act as very strong validation entities for the SEO process.

A good SEO campaign uses link building at the backbone because when done correctly the results radically change SERP placement.