As we all know link building is the major and has been the major hot topic in the SEO world for years.
Lets go back to the beginning before the existence of the artificial intelligent search engines, with very smart and clever algothirms. The old days were great the only way to really get your site noticed was word of mouth - posting your link in forums and other discussion so that people would actually be interested and click on your site. Nowadays the links are still there but are perceived in such a different way now we need to obtain them links not to be clicked on but to be picked up by the search engines spiders. Here we have a look at ways to obtaining these:
Natural Links
Natural links are the best way possible to obtain rankings but are very hard the key is to keep writing unique relevant content and eventually people will start linking back to you. Another half natural way is to submit your sites to top directories this will cause a bounce on effect as most small directories extract content and listings from the larger ones giving you quality one-way links.
Paid Links
Paid links is very much disapproved by most major search engines due to the fact that links are meant to be given to you in a natural way by webmasters because they enjoy your content or what you have to offer. Purchasing links does some what the opposite as it is like paying your way up the SERPs. In the end we all know that gaining links naturally is a very hard task these days as there are billions of web pages, so the best advice fo buying links is find sites that do not tell the whole world they are selling links as the search engines will find out and penalize every site that is involved.
Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal Links have also been somewhat devalued by the search engines lately especially with google due to the same reasons as above, we still think reciprocal links do still have slight value so try and get links that are the same theme as your site and related to the users - and again try to just obtain these via one on one discussions with the webmaster in question.
Three way links
We feel that three way links are a much better alternative than reciprocal linking as there is more weight on these sort of links due to the fact that the site that links back to you, you do not have to link back to them. e.g If we link to www.wordpress.org and they link back to us from a totally different site they have.
Article Links
Article links are a very good way to obtain natural backlinks especially with the rise of social media sites. The way to do this is write a great article or a news flash on your niche. Submit them to sites such as Digg or Propeller and once popular they will bring you in a ton of natural backlinks which the search engine will love.
So whatever ways you decide to do remember stick to the search engines guidelines, as you can never trick them.