When search engines look at other sites, they take note of any links that point to other websites. The more sites that link to your site, the more credibility your site is given when it comes to determining search engine ranking relevancy.

It has been apparent for quite some time that search engines like Google and Yahoo will use the number and quality of incoming links to calculate the credibility of your site.

This calculation only tends to hold true though if the sites showing links to your site have some relevance to your niche topic.

Along with increased search engine results, you also have the benefit of being able to attract traffic from those sites linking to you from their own visitors. People who click links are showing they have an interest in your site's topic, so you know you're getting targeted traffic with can increase your profitability.

This is where it becomes important to be choosy in which sites are placing links to your site. The webcrawlers and search engine algorithms take into account the quality of the site that is linking to you. This means if you're going to ask a site owner for a link pointing to your site, you should be sure that site has good quality content along with a decent amount of traffic going to it. Just requesting a link exchange program from a website that is completely unrelated to yours may actually damage your SEO efforts.

So how do you find the good quality links? While it is possible to buy link-ins from websites seeking a little advertising revenue, this doesn't guarantee the quality of the link you're going to get. Besides there are far cheaper ways to find links into your site that you're able to control much better. Here are some tips for building relevant links.

* Contact the owner of several relevant sites that have similar keywords and topic focus as your own and ask them if they'd like to exchange links with you. This way you're both benefiting from extra back-links into your respective sites. Although this will mean that you have to continually check the outgoing links to make sure the other site is maintaining the link, it is a good way to begin your link building strategy.

*Look around the Internet for blogs, forums and newsgroups that are interested in the niche your website is in. If you find a blog or forum that will be useful join as a member and create a signature that will serve as a link back to your site. Bare in mind that whenever you make a post you must ensure you are adding value to the forum and not just trying to make a sale or pitch for your own website. The more you post valuable and helpful information than the more likely it is that people will click on your signature link to visit your site. Leave helpful comments on blogs and don't forget to leave a link to your website as part of your comment.

While leaving signature lines in forums and community mailing groups used to be a great way to build back-links, many forums now add a ?no-follow? tag so that these links are no longer as effective as they once were. However you may still benefit from the added traffic.

Even though you want to build as many links as possible pointing to your site, quality is still the primary focus. Exchanging links with sites that are completely unrelated to yours, or buying links on link-farms can seriously damage your efforts.

This kind of link maintenance can require quite a lot of time and effort. If you're serious about building your website's credibility properly on an on-going basis, you may find that it becomes a lot more economical to outsource your efforts.

Hiring a company to achieve high quality links that will actually help your SEO and search engine visibility efforts could enhance your website's profitability and popularity faster than you could do it alone.