Choosing an effective website marketing strategy is imperative to have a successful business on the internet today. One of the most important strategies is link building.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN give websites more importance if the site has a high link popularity. This is just a term to indicate how many other sites link to your site. It’s kind of like a popularity contest in high school. The more sites that link to yours, the more the search engines think you actually do know what you’re talking about.

There are several ways to build links. None of them are hard - mostly just a bit tedious. A brand new site with a new domain name is like a store sitting at the top of a mountain peak. Yes, you’re there and open for business but no one knows about you yet. Link building will take care of that and soon you’ll start to have drive-by traffic.

The first thing to do is to submit your site to directories. But forget about submitting it to Google - let the googlebot find your site by itself. The Yahoo directory has a yearly fee of $299. You’ll get listed within 7 days. A link from the Yahoo Directory carries a lot of weight with the search engines. But if it carries too much weight for your pocketbook right now, there are plenty of free directories you can submit to.