One of the primary activities in SEO that will arguably have the most impact on your sites position in the search engine rankings is link building. A web pages position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) is largely dependent on the number and quality of other pages linking to the page. Here we present some of the more common link building techniques to increase your inbound links.

1. Directory submission: Link directories contain pages of categorized links. One method to obtain back links involves submitting your site to these link directories. Directories can be either paid, free or requiring a reciprocal link. The most well known directories include the Yahoo directory and dmoz.

2. Article Submission: Submission of articles to article directories is another common link building technique. At the bottom of an article you submit to an article directory is an author's bio where you can include links to your site, as can be seen at the bottom of this article. One of the positive traits of this form of link building is that you can word your author bio as you want and therefore, have choice over the anchor text of the link.

3. Social Bookmark Submission: Social bookmark sites allow you to bookmark web pages online, and when you do a link is created to the page you bookmark. Submitting pages to social bookmark sites is another common method of link building.

4. Blog Posting.: Similar to article submission, you may be able to contact owners of blogs relating to your niche and provide them with quality content for them to post on their blog. In this content you may put a link back to your site. The key here is to provide quality content so that it is worthwhile for the owner of the blog to post your content.

5. Link Exchange: Some sites participate in link exchanges, where you link to a site in exchange for a link from their site. It is important in link exchange to exchange quality links in limited numbers. There is not a lot of value in much of the mass link exchange some sites engage in that have many pages of links devoted to their link exchanges.

6. Link Bait: This involves the writing of content, of posting of pictures or other interesting posts that other webmaster will find interesting and worth linking too. If the content is of high enough quality if may be featured on sites such as digg, potentially attracting a large number of organic links.

So here we have presented a number of the more common link building techniques. There are many others and a good way to keep up with current link building trends is to become active on one of the many popular web master forums. The key is to try different methods and attempt to get a feel for which methods are more effective through monitoring your sites position in the SERPS. You may want to establish several sites and explore different link building techniques with each site, thus allowing you to observe which technique provides better performance.