Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, you already know that link building is the best way to increase your search engine ranking permanently. While there are many ranking strategies floating around on the web, most of these provide short-lived results, if any. Using a gray or black hat approach may help you rank high today, but a week from now your site may disappear from the search results altogether.

If you already have a link building program in place, how do you know if have the right approach? For starters these are the things you should avoid:

1. Cloaking or hiding links via CSS. You’re likely to get slapped if one of the search engines catches on to your plot, and they will, it’s only a matter of time.
2. Buying links from known paid link sites. Trust me, big G already knows all about these sites. You might as well through this money out the window.
3. Using the same anchor text over and over again. Think about it, if people are creating links to your site, what are the chances hundreds or thousands of people will all use the same anchor text? Your link building efforts have to look natural.
4. Relying on the same type of links. If all your links come from say blog commenting, you lack the link diversity needed to rank for a competitive keyword.
5. Forum spamming. If you don’t have anything valuable to say, you’re better off not saying anything at all.
6. Blog comment spamming. Sure you’ve seen the software pitches promoting 10,000 links in 10 minutes or less. Now ask yourself how effective can this really be?
7. Too many links too fast. Spread out your links over time so that they appear more natural. This is especially true if you are working with a new site.
8. Automated directory submissions. Sure $9.99 or whatever the vendor is charging for submission to 10,000 directories may sound incredibly cheap, but remember you get what you pay for.
9. Ignoring keywords for which your site already ranks. Remember there’s always someone fighting to take over the top position.
10. Swapping links with others. Unfortunately, reciprocal links offer nothing in terms of search rankings. Now if you can get some traffic from these links, that’s a different story.