There are many benefits to link building such as:

• Helps the website to get indexed by the search engines
• Raised the profile of your website
• Targeted traffic from relevant websites
• Wider search engine exposure
• Higher link popularity and page rank

When building links, it is important to take note of the anchor text or keyword to use. This can have a beneficial effect to your overall link building campaign if you use the correct anchor text and keywords. If you want to rank high for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, you need to spend more time and effort to build links using that particular keyword or keyword phrase as anchor text.

Another point take note of is to build your links naturally and organically over a period of time. Although it is hard to suppress the urge to start building links likes there is no tomorrow, search engines and especially Google do penalize websites that build links too fast too soon.

Also, remember spread out your link building efforts across all mediums and websites rather than concentrating on a few sources. One good example is the use of social bookmarking sites to bookmark or build links to your content. Although social bookmarking sites are a good source of to build links and drive traffic, you should never rely fully on a single source. Spread out your link building efforts to article submission blogs, forums and other social media sites such like Squidoo.

Although link building is a task that many webmasters dreaded, it is an essential part of any webmasters activities. If you have the dough, you can outsource your link building campaigns; otherwise another option is to invest in software such as Article Post Robot, Directory Submitter or Backlink Submitter to hasten up your link building efforts.

In a nutshell, if you do a proper link building campaign, it can literally translate to more money for you. Whether you are trying to drive more targeted traffic to your offers or selling text links to other webmasters, it pays to devote time and energy on your link building efforts. I hope this post will give you a good overview of what link building is all about. Also check out my the other post on “Link Building For Beginners” to learn more about link building.

While there is nothing wrong with bookmarking your content manually, it is best to leverage on auto social bookmarking software such as Auto Social Poster to lessen your workload and time so that you can better spend your precious time on more important aspects of your business.

Another option is to outsource your social bookmarking campaigns but it can be very costly in the long run. So the best option is still to invest in a social bookmarking software. There are many social bookmarking software on the market but in terms of usability and success rates, nothing comes close to these 3 software listed below.

• Auto Social Poster (WordPress)

• Bookmarking Demon

• RSS Bookmarker

While these 3 social bookmarking software are not cheap, they are worth every cent of their price tags. If you have budget constraint, you may opt for free social bookmarking services initially. Once you have the money, you should seriously consider getting one of them to automate and speed up your social bookmarking campaigns.

Why social bookmaking sites started to gain in popularity after so many years is still a question. Most likely internet users find social bookmarking sites a good way to store and look for useful information. Social bookmaking sites makes it easy and simple for users to bookmark content quickly for future use and the ability to share bookmarked content with others is consider a cool feature by internet users.

Another reason is due to the immense SEO benefits to websites for internet marketers and webmasters. Through social bookmarking, internet marketers and webmasters are able get their websites indexed on the search engines much quicker than before. The reason for fast indexing is probably due to the high rankings given to social bookmarking sites by Google.

If you do not understand what the fuss on social bookmarking is all about, you can check out this list of social bookmarking sites to see firsthand what social bookmarking is.

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Propeller
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon

Many internet marketers and webmasters now see social bookmarking as a definite strategy in their marketing and traffic generation plans. While Google may not like the way internet marketers and webmasters are utilizing social bookmarking sites to boost their websites rankings in the search engines, so far no one has been penalize using social bookmarking sites to build links and improve their websites search engine rankings. That is why social bookmarking remains an integral part of any serious internet marketer and webmaster marketing and traffic generation plan.

If you are new to link building, just understand that a link coming from a quality site is deem more useful than a few links coming from inferior sites. For example, a link coming from a PR4 (Page Rank) site will be considered by Google to be better than 10 links coming from 10 PR1 sites. Having quality incoming links will give a quick boost to your SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) placement, especially in Google.

However, even though quality links are very important, it is also difficult to get a lot of quality links initially. This is why it is important for you to build links of all sorts and types, regardless of page rank. There are many ways to build links and I have listed down some common methods which you can start building links for a start.

Article Submission
Submitting articles to article directories is one way of building one way links and driving traffic to your site at the same time. Many articles directories are highly placed in the search engines. When your articles are approved and published, most likely your article will get indexed within 24 hours or less, giving you another quality link to boot.

Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs is also another good way to get more links and also drive traffic to your site. Just make sure your not spamming other people’s blog just for the sake of getting some links. The trick is to provide decent comments on the posts.

Directory Submission
Submitting to quality website directories will provide you with quality incoming links for a start. This should be your initial link building method when you are starting a new site. There are both paid and free directory submissions but the frankly for me, the free directory submission will be more than enough for a start.

Forum Signatures
This is another popular method to build links and drive traffic at the same time. Most forums will allow registered users to include links in their signatures and when you make a post; your signature together with your links will appear underneath your posting, giving you another link. The more you post, the more links you will have pointing back to your site. Same as blog comments, the key is not to spam the forum but make intelligent postings.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a relative new way to build links by bookmarking or submitting your content or web pages to social bookmarking sites. This is a good way to boost traffic and build quality links at the same time as a lot of social bookmarking sites have high PR.

As you can see, the methods listed above are more than enough to get you busy for an extended period of time. There are some tools and software that can give you a head-start and save you much time in building links. I have used Article Post Robot, Auto Social Poster and Directory Submitter for my link building efforts and I can say that these are the few tools and software that can really help you a lot. There are some other advance methods of building links which I will talk about another day in another post but for now, these methods will be good enough for you.

As you know, the more incoming links that your website has, the likely Google is going to give your website a higher position in the search engines. Why I mention Google and not the other search engines is because Google is the most dominant search engines at the moment and it pays to be in their good books. Therefore, it is important for you to build links the way Google loves it.

First of all, it is very important for you to build or grow your links naturally. Imagine for a moment if a new site start to gain 1000 links in a day, what will you think Google will do. Most likely, you site will get sandbox and fail to get index in the Google’s search engine listing. You will then have a hard time getting back into the search engine listing. Thus, you have to do it naturally by building a few links at a time.

Secondly, spread out your links building efforts across all mediums and websites. If you have been concentrating your link building efforts on a couple of sites, it won’t look good to Google. It will definitely affect your SERPs as your links do not carry much weight in the eyes of Google as they are all coming from a couple of sites. It pays to spread out your link building efforts.

Last but not least, it is very important to keep to a schedule when building links. As you know, link building can be very tedious and monotonous. It is very important to be discipline and keep to your schedule in order to make sure your site is a success. Only when you can afford to outsource link building activities, then you can put your foot off the peddle for a moment.

The social bookmarking sites are listed in accordance to their Page Rank.

http://del.icio.us 8/10

http://www.digg.com 8/10

http://www.stumbleupon.com 8/10

http://www.furl.net 7/10

http://www.mister-wong.de 7/10

http://www.blinklist.com 7/10

http://de.lirio.us 7/10

http://www.simpy.com 6/10

http://linkagogo.com 6/10

http://netvouz.com 6/10

http://www.spurl.net 6/10

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com 6/10

http://www.backflip.com 6/10

http://www.shadows.com 6/10

http://www.rawsugar.com 6/10

http://www.taggly.com 5/10

http://www.markaboo.com 5/10

http://socialbookmarking.org 5/10

http://www.diigo.com 4/10

http://ma.gnolia.com 4/10

http://www.lookmarks.com 4/10

http://www.blogmarks.net 4/10

http://bluedot.us unranked (Changed domain)

The list above is by no means comprehensive, I will be adding more social bookmarking sites to the list from time to time. If you know of any social bookmarking sites that are not listed here, please feel free to share.

If you are into social bookmarking, chances are this is a useful site that you must not ignore. Long gone are the days whereby you need to submit your pages one by one for each social bookmarking site. With OnlyWire, you can shorten your time spent submitting content to social bookmarking sites. I started using OnlyWire many months back and it helped to cut down my submission time by more than 20 folds. Best of all, it’s free!

To use the OnlyWire, you need to register an account with them. After signing up, you will see a list of social bookmarking sites. The list consist of around 20 over social bookmarking sites, some of them which you may not even seen or heard before. To submit, you need to sign up an account with each social bookmarking site listed on OnlyWire. After you signing up with all the social bookmarking sites listed, you can save all your social bookmarking sites’ login information into Onlywire.

When you do a submission through OnlyWire, you will be submitting your content to 20 over social bookmarking sites with just a click. Isn’t that wonderful!

Sign up for OnlyWire here!

If you have information on other useful resources, please feel free to share with us.