Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.

Even if you have a website with good content, your business may fail miserably if you do not promote it well. So, we can understand promotion is the key to successful online business. A very good way to promote your business is through building links.

By means of link building, you can help bring more people to visit your website through various sources such as article directories, web directories, social networking websites, forums, blogs, link exchanging, etc. The whole process of link building can be time consuming for you if you have a busy schedule. Hence, you need to rely upon experts to popularize your site via link building.

There are plenty of SEO companies that specialize in link building. When you seek assistance from a SEO firm for link building, you will be provided with a detailed link building campaign. SEO companies will make every effort to bring more visitors to your site through high quality links and increase your website’s visibility on search engines.

Through extensive link building, you can make sure that your business outperforms others when visitors search for key phrases and keywords associated to your business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tool, the TouchGraph Google Browser

You can use this free Java application to explore the connections between related websites and quickly find relations that were not obvious before.

Here is an example:

Touchgraph Results for Keyword "link building"

You can see the TouchGraph results for the keyword “link building”, which happens to be one of the keywords that I want to rank for, and which happens to have a lot of competition. The Touch Graph application revealed to me that several of the results that appear on page 1 in Google have a link from a certain page on searchenginewatch.com.

I quickly headed over to that page and left a comment there. Bingo, one step forward regard my link building campaign.