Having links to your website is essential for any online marketer or webmaster looking for a way to get their website noticed. There are several benefits to having links:

1) It increases your ranking in search engines. Search engines like Google and Yahoo use link popularity to valuate the ranking of a particular website. For instance Google has a toolbar that people can download onto their computer and it shows the page ranking of every website you visit. Link popularity plays a major role when Google computes this page ranking for these websites.

Websites you can use to check the link popularity of your website includes: www.Alexa.com www.marketleap.com

2) You can drive traffic to your website. This is a great way to receive targeted traffic for your product or services. Somebody sees your link on a website relevant to yours and then clicks on it and instantly becomes a targeted visitor. Not all traffic you're going to receive is going to come from search engines and you should not just rely on this type of traffic because despite what some individuals claim, high ranking cannot be guaranteed and no one knows the precise algorithms such search engines use. Not to mention that they are always continually changing. The goal is to bring traffic to your site and influence them to continually revisit.

3) Link building also builds credibility. When people consistently see your name and link it builds up brand awareness and makes you seem like an expert within your field.

Even though link building is a great way to get your website noticed there are many things you have to be careful of. Search engines are very savy when it comes to checking the legitimacy of websites. Link spamming and any other sort of illegal tactics will negatively effect your website. Therefore it is very important to not to follow programs that promise you thousands of links and etc. I remember reading a comment by someone who was using one of the popular link building services and they said that their link popularity actually decreased as a result of them using the service.

Another thing to consider is that not every link is the same or at least not in the eye of the search engines. There are basically two types of links search engines play importance to. One is reciprocal links and the other is one-way links. Reciprocal links is basically when you and another website owner exchange links. Thus the term reciprocal. These terms are considered good if your exchanging links with someone who has a website relevant to yours. One-way links is just what it sounds like a one-way link pointing back to your site. Search engines give this the most importance because they consider that a website must be of some value if they have other websites pointing to them. So, in a sense one-way links give you some sort of cyberspace credibility.

Anchor text also plays an importance. Anchor text is the text that is referenced when a link is clicked on. For instance:, "NBA GOODS", is a link to a NBA store. The text NBA Goods is the anchor text that points to the link of the NBA store. Search engines are favorable to anchor text because it can provide some sense or relevancy to your link and gives your link some importance because someone took time out to write text for your links. A link services that I recommend for people to try is at http://www.submission.hiifii.com/. This is not an affiliate link nor do I receive commissions for referring them but through reviewing their website I think they're a new service on the up and coming. One thing that impresses me about their service is that they have a list of all the directories they submit to with a Google page ranking value for each. In addition to, they don't submit to all the directories within one day or 24 hours like some services but actually submits them manually, which gives about a week or two for your submission to be completed. They also allow I believe up to 5 different anchor texts for rotation. Directory submitting is good and recommended so you wont have to worry about any ill effects to your link popularity.

Building links is needed for any website owner and is one of the methods SEO firms utilize, so as you see, receiving great traffic is not easy but yet if you persist eventually you will reap the rewards.