These days, importance is given to link building than anything else in SEO metrics. Out of the various factors considered today as must have’s for SEO, link building stands out. At the forums and discussion boards, there is always someone who’s looking for outsourced SEO’s who can work on link building for their site. Many are preferring cheap SEO’s too. Hmm, though it looks murky, I’m not of the opinion that link building should be outsourced to any cheap SEO.

If you take a look around, you’ll see that out of all the bloggers, only a few say less than 10% even consider outsourcing link building. The majority of them handle it themselves. And they are good at it. May be there’s something you can learn here.

1. Link building is not tough as it seems like.
You have no clue why your site is getting a better PR, or a better position. That doesn’t mean that your link building campaigns, if at all any, has gone wrong.
Probably it means that you’re not doing it right. I’ll get to some tips of how to do link building successfully down the article.

2. Link building is not easy as it seems like.
Having said that, it’s not something everyone can focus on. Many of us do a one man job at the site, writing content, tweaking template etc. In between all this, link building goes out of focus and remain down the priority list.

3. Link building is not about commenting and directory submission alone.
Many of us count link building practices limited to directory submission and commenting. Well, honestly that’s only 10% of the whole process. There is a whole lot more in link building. Let’s see further.

Let’s clear some common mis conceptions about link building.

Last, day I asked a question, what are your link building methods?

And the common answer many agreed on was that - Exclusive content and natural linking will help you more than anything else. 

Josh Spaulding says that, since he deals with niche sites, he believes in natural linking though he submits his blog to directories.

Josh is right. If you have a niche site, and if you haven’t marketed in properly, it is highly unlikely that it will get noted by others and hence the link building will be fairly okay while not helping the site much. In such cases two things can help.

1. Directory submission and  2.Social Media Optimization.
If you submit the site to some quality directories, it is likely to get some attention and traffic(Not all does give it, you have to chose wisely).It would help you get some Google juice atleast, again it’s only a better alternative to waiting for your content to get noticed.

Social Media Optimization is the thing! If you are clever enough to create a remarkable(in the right sense of it’s meaning) article, which is likely to get noted by others, then things happen really quick! People notice your blog and favour it with links. Just what we wanted.

Nitin Pai is of the opinion that, natural linking is the best way to get links.

Here too, the uncertainty in when you will get the incoming links and attention is something that will put us off.Again, SMO will help you out here.

Rajan and Mohan is also of a similar opinion. They say that the content itself will bring you links if it’s exclusive.

So what we can learn from this discussion is that taking into consideration, the uncertainty and ambiguity in waiting for the spotlight to feature your content, taking a step forward and creating those killer, viral articles optimized for the social media, would help you more than anything else in building links.

• Agreed that content is king and exclusive content will bring you natural links but optimizing your site for the social media is the right weapon to hunt for links. It’s a fool proof strategy. Waiting for natural links to come is vague.
• Links from commenting does not help you get a higher page rank.
  I heard some one say that he builds couple of links a day through commenting to ensure that his page rank is better the next update. It’s a wrong idea. Commenting on blogs can only bring you traffic, and backlinks on Yahoo and MSN but not Google, unless if the blog is “Nofollow” free.
• Links from forums don’t help you at all.
  I know many of you will disagree with me on this. I can explain.
  Just answer the following questions and you will agree with me.

  - How many links can you gather from a forum?
  - If you are getting signature links at a forum, many others would. Isn’t it?
  - If all of us link to our sites from one single forum (or as many which provides sig links), wouldn’t Google put them all in one bracket ?
  - What’s that you’ll get from a forum that other’s don’t?

  Do you get my point now? From my experience, if you rely solely on forum links, they don’t give you any exclusivity at all. If you know of a forum that allows signature links, probably everyone will. Though it carries some weight, when everyone starts getting incoming links from common domains, they does not give you that edge over others. This is more applicable in the case of sites that fight for positions on the SERPs. For the small time amateur blogger, who just needs an incoming link for the sake of it, it works fine.

So the point here is that, handling link building campaigns yourself may not give you the desired effect because you are not specialized in it. But if you are very clever, there’s nothing stopping you. From my experience, hiring a so called “cheap SEO” doesn’t serve the purpose if you are looking for quality links. Many of them I know rely on forum links, directory submissions and at the most article submission. Beyond all these traditional methods, I’ll rank Social Media Optimization as the right weapon. If you can find someone who’s good at it, he can give you quality links than a cheap SEO. Remember, links are not just about numbers, it’s also about quality. Fifty incoming links from forums/directories is equal to five quality contextual incoming links.