For most major search engines, links are a critical component of rankings. Search engines look at links as recommendations from other websites. The engines surmise that if your site is popular enough to have other people link to it, then it must be important. Therefore, the more links you have, the more popular you are, and the higher you will rank in search engine results. Seems simple, doesn't it! However, it can take a great deal of effort and time to build up a large number of links.

What Are Your Options

If you know nothing about building links, you may want to hire a company to handle the process for you. Your other options would be to buy links from a company or just hire someone to work in your company on the campaign. As you can imagine, in every case, it will cost you a pretty penny and it can still take some time. There is no magic button to get the job done and walk away. Let's compare your options for getting someone else to build your links.

• Hire A company – You can find a number of companies that offer link building services. These companies usually have tons of contacts and can get you highly ranked links very easily. However, the problem with hiring a company is not knowing what links you will get. While some companies only use white hat techniques, others may link you to sites that eventually lead to trouble. If you go with this option, make sure you get a detailed report of all the links and check them out personally.

• Buy Your Links – Most of the major search engines frown on buying links and they will eventually determine which links are bought. There are ways to get around this by purchasing three way links, but you do have to be careful. Make sure that the company you build your links from allows a plan where you can slowly build links. You don't want to have 500 links placed in one day. The search engines will obviously see this as a problem.

• Hire A Company Employee – You could hire someone in your company to work on your link building campaign as their job. Depending on the number of links you want, you could hire someone full time or maybe just part time. This would allow you the opportunity to directly oversee your link building campaign. However, it would mean taking on all the things that come with a new employee, like sick days, vacation insurance, and unemployment. This can end up being a high price tag to get the job done.

DIY - Do It Yourself

Even if you have no prior experience, you could run your own link building campaign. There are thousands of tutorials on the web today to offer tips and tricks. There are also software programs and websites that help you build your own links for a small fee. If you can put forth the time and the effort, building your own links is really the best approach to take. You can also have a clearer picture of what you have done and what you should do next. In the end, no one is going to care about the outcome of your link building campaign as much as you do.

Keep Up The Good Work

A link building campaign should be ongoing. Just because a site is popular that you link to now, does not mean it will be in the future. Websites come and go; you need to continually build new links from popular site if you want to be popular with the search engines.