If creating large amounts of original, well-written content is considered King for search-engine-optimization purposes, building quality links back to your Web site might be considered the Holy Grail.
Search engines conclude that Web sites with more back links must be more popular and authoritative that Web sites with fewer back links.
If you are serious about search-engine-optimization, you should proactively and aggressively build links. However, the process of gaining and maintaining search-engine ranking is very competitive, and if you want to rank well in the search results you need to have not only great content, but also quality, relevant back links.
Focus on trying to build quality and relevant links.
Two of the main measures of popularity are Google’s PageRank and the Alexa ranking system. PageRank gives you a rough idea of how authoritative Google thinks the Web site is, and Alexa provides a measure to compare the traffic volume of potential linking partners. In general, you should look for quality and relevant linking partners that have PageRank scores and Alexa rankings as good as or better than your own.
One of the more time-consuming forms of link building includes requesting one-way or reciprocal links directly from other Web sites.
Sending out online press releases through companies such as PRWeb and PR Newswire is a great way to build links.
The most simple and easy way to build links is to buy them through link brokers and pay-per-post networks. However consider carefully before you use link brokers and pay-per-post networks because search engines such as Google have strict policies against the use of paid links as a way of increasing PageRank.
Alexa rankings can’t be the sole determinants of measuring a sites importance and popularity as the http://www.alexa.com rankings do not take into account all the browser types like Windows Vista etc.