This article was written by Guest Blogger Elizabeth Ashe of SEO Skills Unleashed.

Link building is one of the most significant website promotion strategies you can use. Not only does it give you the opportunity to get traffic from other websites, it is also a key factor in your search engine rankings. When it comes to links, more is better.

There are, however, a few caveats to that notion. These include:

• In order for links to be effective, they must come from websites with topics that are related to yours. If you have a knitting website, for example, links from wholesale car part distributors won’t do you much good.
• You’re better off not having links from so-called “bad neighborhoods.” These include directories that do not review websites before posting them and free-for-all sites. They are highly unlikely to bring you any traffic from their visitors, and the search engines could penalize your site if your link appears there.
• Reciprocal links should be used sparingly and judiciously. There’s no harm in trading links with a few highly relevant sites, but if that’s where all your links come from, you won’t see as much benefit as you would from more one-way links.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, there are many ways that you can get links coming in to your site. Here are some of the most effective:

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