How important is Link Building to optimize your website for search engines? Very very important. This technique will help you improve your website's page rank and also get free flowing traffic. It is also very important that the "quality" of incoming links to your site is good.

Submitting your website to quality search engine friendly web directories will significantly improve your website's page rank. More incoming links to your site, the better. Also very important is the quality of incoming links. What I mean is: Make sure you submit to good web directories which are indexed in Google(a page rank of at least one) or other major search engines. Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web. This will adversely affect your page rank by linking to those links.

Equally important is that your website should be listed in the most appropriate category
. Eg: If your site offers help on legal advice, you can submit your site to the most appropriate category. Your site will be listed in these webdirectories along with your competitors. But this will be good, since search engines will try to match the incoming link's category with your site's service. It it matches, a better rank is given to your site.

Also important is that the link name or anchor text to your site in the web directory should be appropriate. Eg: If your site offers legal help, the link name in the webdirectory page should contain the words "Legal help". This will also help improve your site's ranking.

There are free as well as paid web directories. There are many free quality web directories like www.webdirectoryone.com or paid directories like yahoo web directory. Adding to high quality paid directories like yahoo directory is worth the price.

2> Social bookmarking

Sites such as del.icio.us, furl.net, blinklist.com can provide an excellent source of quality incoming links to your website. Social bookmarking is a way of of saving the address of a website you want to visit in the future. These social bookmark web sites let you create an online public space to add your bookmarks and also lets you share with other surfers. These social bookmark sites have high PageRank and are frequently visisted by search engine spiders. If you take a closer look:

Thomas George is a lead SEO specialist of http://www.mysiteonweb.com, an Internet company that specializes in helping small businesses create their own websites as well offers cheap domain names.