One of the most important ingredients in a good SEO campaign is link building. It can also be one of the toughest. Searchengines can be a little tough on unethical link building strategies and if you add the growing use of ‘nofollow’ attributesto links, gaining quality links takes a lot of work. This list itemizes most of the link building opportunities available.

10: Link Farm: Link farms are outdated and generally result in search engine penalties. No longer worth thinking about.

09: Paid Reviews: There is an old saying in the IT world - GIGO - garbage in garbage out. Generally speaking paid reviews arepoorly written articles on non-relevant sites. If you can get a good review on highly ranked relevant site then you may getvalue for your money - otherwise treat with caution.

08: Text Link Ads: There can be value in obtaining text link ads but these are generally from low ranking sites. As with the paid reviews, obtaining text link ads on high ranking related sites may be of value.

07: Link Solicitation: Obtaining links from related sites by solicitation can be difficult. You need to be able to prove tothe site owner that there is a mutual benefit. The higher the site ranks the harder it can become. However this can provide agood cross section of related sites.

06: Hand Edited Directories: DMOZ and Yahoo are two of the major directories. DMOZ can take up to 12 months to get listed.Yahoo!, whilst a paid listing, remains reasonably good value. Directory links seem to have been reduced in value recently.

05: Article Directories: Article directories are hit and miss. You can spend hours putting together a series of articles only to find that most of them get scraped without any links back to your site. When the article is used legitimately you have no control as to the sites relevance or reliability.

04: Social Bookmarking: Having your site listed and voted on in some of the social bookmarking sites can provide somebenefits to your link building campaign. Many social bookmarking sites incorporate ‘nofollow’ so don’t rely on them for masses of links. The traffic generated by lead to an increase in organic links.

03: Press Releases: Press releases can provide a quick lift in rankings. If the press release is well written and provides alittle spark then you may find an increase in traffic along with an increase in organic links.

02: Edu and Gov sites: Obtaining links from these sites can be hard. The more important the link location the higher value.

For example, a link in and Edu report or research paper is highly prized.

01: Blended Link Building: Blended link building incorporates a variety of strategies. The aim is to obtain links from a variety of sources, each with varying ranking factors but all from relevant web pages where possible.

Blended link building can be slow and tedious but it does produce great long term website rankings in the major searchengines.