Link building is an essential factor that determines whether your sites achieve SEO success or failure. If you build links correctly and naturally, you can gain a lot of back links which will help increase the organic traffic to your site.
It is always exciting when you first put your new website live on the Internet. If you have some knowledge about SEO, you will be eager to start building links aggressively. However, this is not the best way to build links. In fact, if you buy backlinks too aggressively in the beginning, your site may get penalize and banned for trying to game the search engines.
If you are lucky enough to escape the ban and get high rankings in the beginning, you will soon find that the rankings drop very quickly too.
Therefore, you should always build links naturally. What I mean by naturally is to build links slowly and steadily. Search engines love natural links as it is the only way that shows your site has valuable content and people are willing to link back to you.
After your new website is live on the Internet, what you can do is to start writing one or two articles and manually submit them to a few article directories. You can also submit your site to a few SEO-friendly directories for one-way backlinks. One directory that I will recommend you to submit early is DMOZ. Submission to DMOZ is free but the approval may take up to 9 months.
Other than article marketing and directory submission, you can also submit your new site to a few social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. This will make search engines discover your new site earlier and index your site quicker.
After you have done all those steps above, you should progress into steady link building process. Join forums and participate in the discussions. You can include your website URL in your signatures which will help build links when you participate in the discussion.
What you should not do is to buy backlinks from other authority sites. Search engines have noticed this trick by many search engine optimization experts and will not take the purchased link into their account. This means that you will be wasting money to buy the links as search engines will not count those links as backlinks.
Last but not least, you should always turn your site into a link bait by always adding informative content to it. This will encourage more webmasters to link to your sites when they share your information with their readers. With this, your site will be getting a lot of natural back links which will definitely help you achieve SEO success.