In-bound links to your website are partially responsible for you website earning higher rankings in search engine result pages. There are several factors involved in rating the links to a webpage- quality, quantity and relevance. If a website is genuinely linking to your site, it is due to the content and its relevance. It also indicates a vote to your site proving its popularity.

SEO techniques are primarily based on the process of link building. However, there are many webmasters engaged only in link building schemes disregarding the quality of the links and their sources. In the process of link building if you are violating the ?webmaster guidelines? of Google, it can negatively impact the rankings of your site in search engine result pages. It is always advisable to keep away from some of the link building techniques that can cause penalty to your website, the ultimate penalty being ?banishment?.

With the advanced technologies of search engines it is increasingly difficult to manipulate a link building method that will secure top rankings in search engines for long periods of time. However, you should know understand specific methods that you must do away with to develop your SEO campaign within search engines? norms.

Avoid links developed to manipulate page rank:

Little knowledge is dangerous. Many SEO service providers assume that huge number of links to the website can help to increase its PageRank. Little do they know that it is the quality and not the quantity of the links that matters while counting the PageRank? Hence, their link building strategies may include getting links from any website and by adopting any method. Be aware of such practices, chances are high of your website being banned for spamming.

Avoid Bad neighbourhood on the web:

As far as the link building strategies are concerned, the tricky practice of SEO is to avoid linking to sites that use spammy SEO techniques. Search engines are growing smart to take action against such sites and penalise the websites linking to them. Avoid linking to ?link farms? and websites using black hat SEO techniques such as- hidden text, doorway pages or cloaking, keyword stuffing, duplicate content. Before linking any website, check if it has been banned by any search engine.

Avoid excessive reciprocal linking:

Once upon a time, reciprocal linking was the easiest and cheapest way of securing links from other websites. But, search engines, these days, have found out the spammy techniques used by many webmasters through link exchange and hence, give little value to reciprocal linking. One way links to your website are of greater value and the search engines also count on links from reputed and relevant sites while calculating PageRank of your webpages.

Avoid selling or buying links that pass PR:

This is another kind of spam and obviously, a bad SEO practice. Link naturally to any website that you feel relevant and have informative content for your visitors. It will also help to increase the credibility of your site. Give other website the reason to link to you through your content.

Before taking any decision regarding your link building strategies, check each link twice, is the new link beneficial and related to your website in anyway? If you really want your website to earn organic links try to develop unique and relevant content that is useful for the visitors.