These days, networking is the key, and the same fact is proving to be especially true in the to the realm of online business. Good friends can assist you in forming good connections, and likewise, partnering with decent sites will help boose your Search Engine ranking and bring you potential customers.

This technic is called "Link Building" which generally means persuading other sites to link to your site. It is an extremely effective way of marketing because it gives a feeling of "sharing" with each other, and therefore does not seem like cold, hard marketing.

If many links from other sites point to your site (also referred to as inbound links), it indicates a high level of Link Popularity, and Link Popularity contributes largely to your site's placement on the Search Engines. Most search engines rank their search result on the site's Link Popularity, so it is a great way to help your site gain competitive PageRank (PR).

Imagine this: picture yourself in highschool walking alone in the hall way. Are you visible enough? Not very likely. Now imagine this: you are walking with a bunch of popular kids, exchanging conversations. Do people notice you more? Of course. And the image helps class you as a part of the "in" crowd. The same philosophy holds true for the Search Engine Marketing world.

While building links might appear simple and easy, it actually requires artful strategy and careful planning. The major downside of this effective marketing tool is that it is time-consuming because you have to invest a lot of time and effort in finding the right linking partners, requesting for the links and waiting for the search engines to "spider" your link partners.

To save yourself from investing in the wrong place, there are important factors that should be taken into consideration. First and most important is the PageRank of the linking page. The higher the PageRank of the page linking to your site, the higher the value you get.

However, if that high PageRank page has several other outbound links, the value drops. Here is a simple equation: The total PageRank value of that page - the total number of outbound links on that page = the value your page gets from a linking page. Therefore, it is as important to bear in mind the total number of outbound links as to consider the PageRank of the linking page.

Of course, it would be unnatural for your page to get a link from a page of an entirely different industry. Page relevance plays an important role in making your link credible, so you should try to get a link from a category relevant to yours.

Other than pages relevant to your industry, another type of sites that can help draw traffic to your page is media sites since people rely on them for information. Check out reporter bylines and look up the "contact us" page for contact details. Many sites also have a "submit a release" page for you to write them. Also, you should try to submit your press release to a newswire and have them distribute your news to thousands of journalists on their database.

There are several other tactics to help build decent links such as writing good anchor texts, writing good concents, and more. Once you have built strong links, it is also important to check them on a regular basis to make sure that your inbound links still work. Most importantly, steer clear from "dark side" link building since you might get penalized and that will certainly affect your site's ranking.