You've built a great website, loaded it with fantastic products and services, and now you're wondering to yourself how in the world do you get visitors to see it ? Building up a good amount of links into your site from other websites is an excellent way to increase the traffic to your website. So how do you build links ? There are many ways to build up links into your site. In this article I'll go over ten ideas that should help you with building links and traffic to your site.

1. Reciprocal Links - Do some research, find other websites that are related to yours in some way and contact the webmaster about a possible link exchange. Don't spam a thousand sites bugging for links. Take your time and write up a professional request. Remember that quality is better than quantity, choose the sites you exchange links with wisely, don't just swap links with any site you come across.

2. Website Directories - Submit your site to website directories, most offer free links. This can be time consuming, but it's well worth the effort. Some website directories charge a small fee for links, only you can decide if the link that it will provide for your website is worth paying for.

3. Blogs - Posting comments on blogs is a great way to build back links. Don't just comment and leave nothing but a link to your site, be sure the comment you leave is relevant to the blog post, and your link back is not done in a spammy way.

4. Forums - Most forums allow signature links, not only do you gain a link back with your signature but you also gain a lot of exposure because your signature shows up every time you make a post in a forum.

5. Buying links - There are many, many sites that offer link sales. You can purchase links on their home pages, sub pages and some will sell site wide links. Again, you should be choosy when deciding whether or not to buy links on a website. Be sure the link you're buying is a good value for you money. You want your back links to benefit you, not hinder your efforts. Don't buy links on sites that seem spammy, or shady.

6. Offer Something Free - Free clipart, free templates, free web tools, anything free. People like free and WILL link to it !

7. Write a "How To" on a popular subject - A good "how to" will be read and people will "Digg" it, this will bring you even more traffic and back links.

8. List your site on the popular Social Bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, Spurl, De.lici.ous.

9. Write an authoritative article - Write a great article and submit it to the top article directories. Remember, the key to getting link backs this way is in your "about the author" box. Be sure you link back to your site and choose good anchor tags !

10. Pay a Link Builder - If you just don't think you have the time, energy or motivation to do all the steps above you can always hire a professional link builder. Professional link builders will charge based on the amount of submissions they do for you usually. Do yourself a favor and check references before hiring any link builder, you do not want to hire someone who submits your site to thousands of free for all links pages, these are considered link farms and will not benefit your site in any way.