Link building should be part of your on-going efforts to generate traffic and improve your site's organic search ranking. Looking at link building in the context of SEO, your best bet for success lies in emphasizing growth in the number of quality links that point to your site. In short, the more high quality links you have pointing to your site, the better. The search engines' view on this point is simple: If your content is authoritative and valuable, other people will link to it. If the people linking to your content are also viewed as being authoritative, then the search engines consider the value of their links to be greater than links from a low authority website.
While links have traditionally been important influencers on relevancy ranking, it's important to understand that not all links are equal, at least not in the eyes of the search engines. Recent changes in the Google algorithm have been aimed at rooting out artificial link building strategies and minimizing...