What is the most effective way to build links for your site?

I have seen in many forums that nowadays website owners are little confused regarding link building for their site. They are not very sure what link building strategies they should adopt. Not to mention Google and yahoo heavily rely on quality back links. Content optimization is always a factor but these two search engines are heavily relying on volume of links and of course quality of links. A link back from a page where there are hundreds of links would not help you much. At the time of link building most people forget about the importance of link building. A theme based link back is more powerful than 20 non relevant link backs. Some times people reject link exchange request due to lack of pr of the link page. But you should know that relevancy is more important than page rank of a link page. If you get an offer for link exchange then first check if the site is any way related to your business? If yes then check its link page for (a) Number of outgoing links on that page (b) Does that link page has all kind of sites? (c) Does that page is accessible from home page ? These 3 are must.
We often get questions that our site is new, no one wants to exchange link with us. Yes it's a big problem for any webmaster. But think if you propose a link from some of your other websites to the webmaster then he'll certainly exchange link with you. But what if you don't have any other site, then how you can do one way link building? Many seo companies, including us provide this kind of service at very reasonable rate, you can hire those companies. Let's get back to the topic. There are thousands of sites for any category of sites you have. If you start gathering a list of relevant sites through search engine you'll get bogus data/ search results after you cross page 20 or more. So it's not a solution to gather sites from search engines. You should follow your competitor’s link backs and then approach relevant ones for link request. How you'll find link backs list of your competitors? it's very simple just use linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorurl.com in yahoo search to find link backs of that site. Then sort relevant ones for your site and then email those sites such a way that they should feel interested to your proposal. You should know here that one way links are many times more effective than reciprocal link building. So if you have other relevant site then you can use that site to propose a link exchange to your relevant sites. If you don't have any other site to propose link back then you can always use directory submission, Blog submission join forums to get some links to your domain.
Hard problem what anybody face at the time of link exchange if you don't have page rank on your proposed link page. 80% link requests get trashed because of "no pr" or "low pr'. After directory submission, Blog submission waits for next Google PR update. You'll surely get pr 3-4 if you have 100-150 link backs. Now when you have good Pr then start link building for your site. If you are going to propose a well established site be sure you linked back the site first. Otherwise they may reject your proposal. The process I'm discussing here is actually 3 way - for your site A you are proposing a link back to site B from your site C. So this is 3 way link building. This kind of link building is hard to get detected by search engines because they can't find a clue. But remember you should host your site C on a different server with different ip. For this different server and ip factor search engines can't detect the link.
But here is a big question - is it completely valueless if we do reciprocal link building? NO it's not. Reciprocal link building has value but not as one way. Search engines now understand that both sites have mutually agreed to show each others link to gain link popularity. But in case of one way it can't trace a link back. That's why it gives more value to those one way links. Why one way links are important? Think of a situation: can you ask Google.com or yahoo.com to place your link on their home page? No, if you even do they'll not place your link. But many web sites place a link of Google/ yahoo/ msn on their page. That creates the one way link for those domains. They are doing nothing to get a link back. When a site continues to get more and more one way links then search engines also start to think that the domain must be important so other sites are linking back. I would suggest you do mixture of everything. 1) Do one way link building 2) submit your site to free and paid directories 3) Make your own Blog and submit it to Blog directories 4) Use article submission.
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