But there certainly is a faster way to have your website indexed on Google, it is through link building. In link building, you get in touch with other website owners or webmasters by emailing or calling them, and getting them to link their website to your own.

There are currently three types of links: one-way inbound links or links coming in to your website; reciprocal links or mutual links between your website and the other website; and three way links. Three way links are actually a ploy by webmasters, who own multiple websites, to build up a specific website. With a three-way link, webmasters will link your site to their site. In return, they will ask you to link to the website they are building up.

Link building is the one aspect of SEO that is the most time-consuming. But if you are a website owner, it should be on your to-do list because of the following:

Faster indexing on Google

Aside from marketing your website, one of the most important things you should do is to tell the search engines about your website. Left alone without link building, it will take about six months to get Google's sand box.

With links, Google indexes your website for as short as within 24 hours, especially if the links are coming from old websites with high Page Ranks. Search engines have indexed those websites time and again.

Top ranks On Search Engine Results

In 2006, an SEO contest was held in the Philippines to determine what SEO techniques are very effective in getting a website to the top of search engine results. Guess what technique the winners of the SEO contest used?

If done right and persistently, link building will get you at the top of search engines. Make sure that the anchor text to your website contains your keywords in the anchor text. Anchor text is the text on the other website that hyperlinks to yours.

Generate Traffic

Link building is also a great way to drive traffic to your site. Since your link partners have their own set of visitors, you increase your chances of those visitors finding you if your sites are linked.

Prospects for Useful Partnerships

Your link building efforts will ultimately lead you to other sites that are strategic to your website and your business. Chances are your link building prospects are also linking to your direct competitors.

Don't overdo link building though. Google once applied a dampening filter when it found out that the average content-rich website took one year to link with 100 other relevant links, but found a similar website that had 200 to 300 per month. This is because the overdone link building efforts were seen as efforts to manipulate Google's results. SEO experts believe this is what happened to the websites that disappeared from the search engine's index altogether.