Links are the 800lb gorilla in every search engine optimisation (SEO) proposal. As professional optimisers we would much prefer if links were entirely unnecessary; in theory a good site, presented well, should rank well.
Links matter and anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong. It doesn't matter if you're starting a small hobby site or a large corporate site, your search engine rankings will suffer enormously if you solider on without garnering any links.
I put the word ethical in the title of this article for good reason; building links can be achieved through a vast array of methods, only a subset of which are ethical, and by ethical we mean not perceived as spamming techniques by the major search engines. You might not care about social ethics, but you really should care about what the search engines feel is spamming; because if you fall on the wrong side of that line you are setting yourself up for penalties, bans and general poor ranking.
So; without further ado, let's get stuck in to our ethical link building list:
Reciprocal Linking: you link to me, I'll link to you. Unethical and ineffective. In theory this isn't particularly awful; but theory is not what we work with. In practice this is manifested in links pages and links directories - just labelling a page as such is now part of a trigger for a spam penalty on that page. A list of links to other websites which may or may not be related to yours is fairly useless to your visitors and has an incredibly obvious footprint which is identified and discounted with ease. Bundle open jaw linking (also the variant known as triangular or three-way linking), in here as well; as much as you think it is a foolproof method it is still very easy to detect in a completely automated system.
Farmed Articles
One way links (request, FFA, directories)
Buying links
SEO condoms
Link baiting - great content
Link baiting - factual content
Link baiting - widgets
Alloyfish
