Link Building   

Back links are clickable links pointing to your website.  They serve 2 functions; direct visitors, who click the link to go to your site, and increased search engine rankings.  Each link is kind of like a ‘vote’ for your site in the search engines eyes.  The way they see it, another website owner has seen your site, concluded it would benefit his visitors in some way, and placed a link to your site from his.  The more links you have, the more votes, the higher the search engines place you in their results. 

Link building is the main way to improve you websites position in the search engines.   The volume and quality of links pointing to your site is the biggest factor and cannot be overlooked.

Link building is the practice of gaining back links pointing to your site.  There are 100’s of different ways of obtaining back links, and I regularly use about 20 of the most effective link building techniques.  The main ones are submitting your site to web directories, getting links from relevant blogs, utilising social networks and using article directories.  Generally, the more links you have the higher rank in the search engines you will achieve.

I also use some reciprocal linking, which means exchanging links with other related sites.  This practice is done very selectively, as these '2 way' links are given less weight in the search engine algorithm.  I do buy some links, these range in price, but are highly effective when trying to gain very high quality back links.

So, how many links do you need?  More than your competitors, and then a few more for good measure.  The quality of the links is also important, so you will need more high quality links than the top sites too.