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Link Building is really all about getting incoming links to your website or web page. We have already looked at submitting your site to directories and will now look at other options and strategies.
Links from sites or pages with similar themes to your page are generally considered to be better than links from pages where the content is not similar.
Anchor text is the words that ae clicked on when you follow a link. wherever possible, you want to try and have this text actually be one of your main keywords. This is seen to be fairly important as the Search engines take notice of this text. Your aim should be to choose 2 or 3 keywords/phrases and make use of them as anchor text for external links pointing to your site.
When someone finds your site and posts a link to it you don't have the luxury of choosing the Anchor text. That is why it is important, where you can to request a specific wording of a link.
Firstly, if you already have another website or even several websites you will probably want to include a link from them to your new site. Additionally, you will probably want to have a link from your new site back to your other sites as well.
If you don't have any other sites, then you should try and contact other webmasters and arrange for a reciprical link. The easiest place to start is by looking at one of the Webmaster Forums and making a request.
Another place to try is to find sites that have a similar theme to yours and contact the owner and request a reciprical link. You may spend a fair bit of time doing this without a lot of response, but it is a worthwhile part of getting quality links.
Not all links to your site help, in fact, some can actually harm you. Links from free-for-all link farms are not going to help you. A lot of the Search Engines recognise these sort of pages as having little to no value and actually apply penalties to sites linked from them. You are basically "guilty by association" when you website (link) hangs out in the Bad Neighbourhood (linkfarm). A Bad neighbourhood can usually be identified by trying to search for it in the SE's - you often cannot find them.
Blogs and Forums are another place where you can gain incoming links to your website. Most Forums allow you to have a signature. In that signature you may be allowed to put a link back to your site. Additionally, depending on the nature of the forum, you may also get an opportunity to post a link to your site. A link from a Forum will probably not carry much weight as far as the Search Engines are concerned, but if you participate and the forum is large and active, it will probably generate some Site Visitors for you.
When you read a blog and there is a post about a similar subject to your site on it you may be able to add a suitable comment. If you add a comment you can quite often put in your URL as well. Additionally, if you have a blog, you could write a short article and have a link in it back to your website.
When participating in a forum or leaving comments on someone else's Blog it is always recommended to do it in such a way that it adds to the original article/discussion and not simply a spam type comment. A spam looking comment will probably be removed and if that happens then it was not worth the effort of writing it in the first place.
One way of getting links is to pay for them. In terms of your SEO efforts, this is probably not the best strategy. If you consider that a link you pay for will only remain in place as long as you pay, it can become very expensive!
In most cases, paying for a link for a few months on another website will probably not help your SEO efforts, but it will probably help you gain some site visitors. For a new website the hard part is to get the visitors and paying from $50-50 for a link on a popular site for 1-3 months may be within your budget and get you some visitors while you continue to work on getting Search Engine Traffic.