Link Building is the process of establishing links from other websites to point to your website. In general, there are two main reasons to build links to your website;

1. Direct Click-Through Traffic - This is inbound traffic where internet users directly click a link and are sent to your website. The more links that point to your website, the more traffic that will visit your website.



2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Many search engines rank pages based on inbound links, Google in particular. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, describes
   
   "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
   
   Because of this, it is important to build up as many good, quality links to your site as possible.

Ways of Increasing Inbound Links

• General Directory Listings - There are many different online directories that are free or you can pay to be listed in. Directories such as the Open Directory Project, Yahoo, and Business.com are a few good examples.
• Industry-Specific Directories and Resources
• Reciprocal Linking - This is the process of trading links with another site. That is you put a link to another website on your site in exchange for that site linking to your site. This used to be more common but as of late, it has been frowned upon by search engines such as google.
• Complementary Sites