Link building, like most things are best left to the experts. However, if you have a deadline and every link builder you know seems occupied, Debra Mastaler has a helpful link building checklist that will come in handy, when the occasion (unavailable link builders) arises.

Steps to link building:-

• Apply to the Yahoo! directory (cost – moderate)
• Submit to solid directories such as Joe Ant, GoGuides, BOTW, Ezilon, Rubberstamped and Massive Links. (cost -moderate)

After all the hoopla and hue and cry over a thread called Google's Guideline on Link Exchange in Webmaster world, Google finally clarifies its stance and what it meant in Webmaster Help Center.

“Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")

Jim Boykin has a very helpful post on How to Achieve Higher Rankings and Stay out of Google Hell Via Optimized Internal Linking. Basically, he explains the process he undergoes:

1. “I’ll start by looking at how many pages the site has indexed in google by going to google and typing in (for example):Site:mysite.com which will show me how many pages the website consists of in the eyes of google.

Just when you think all is said and done about link building something new occurs. Rand Fishkin in a blog post draws attention to the typical patterns of external link equity that flows to sites. The graph often resembles mountains to heavily linked-to pages and valleys to link-poor pages. Good content gets more inbound links. Pages related to e-commerce or business receive very little link love.

Is Google trying to dictate the terms to webmasters? The search engine world has faced a mini-hurricane after Matt Cutts asked webmasters to report paid links in the authenticated spam report form at Google’s webmaster console. Matt asked to mention “paidlink” in the text area and provide information as:

Something like “Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that” or “www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html” is all you need to mention.  

Getting authoritative links is essential for any website. A post on Search Engine Watch by Eric Enge talks about getting such links through relationship building process. Eric says that the nine steps given in the approach definitely works.

• Build a list of authoritative sites that you would really like to get a link from

While the subjects of one way and reciprocal links have been overdiscussed and the same points revisited over and over again, the benefits of insite liking still remains underexplored. There is a nice post at Pandia which discusses insight linking quite thoroughly.

According to the post, advantages of smart internal linking include:

• Highlighting particular phrases for certain search phrases
• Anchor texts of these links tell the search engines clearly what the page is all about

Popuri.us permits the users to 'check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!'

This is an excellent tool to know about all the relevant link popularity information in one go.

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In an article on SEOMoz, Rand Fishkin informs Every Site is Linkbait & Linkerati Worthy. He talks about how any site is capable of attracting significant links.

How do you build a site that crushes the competition -one that ensures your utter dominance in the field of baking cakes and shlepping latkes? Simple. You build not only for your customers, but for the linkerati, too.

Brandon Hopkins has compiled a list of 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007. Though this list contains some tips which are known to all, however, there are some other relevant tips as well. In all a great compilation and worth going over.