Link building is just one of the two kinds of search engine optimization tasks. It is the process in which off-page optimization is done and on-page as its opposite. In terms of link popularity, link building is the best technique.
Link popularity is measured according to the number of inbound links (coming from other) that are leading to your website. This, however, is based on the relevance of the links in order to be marked as valid by the search engines. If the search engines find that most of your inbound links are coming from irrelevant websites, your goal of having the site you are optimizing gain higher ranking won’t be materialized. Instead, your website would be buried in the search engine listing. If that would happen, you are definitely a failure in SEO venture. I would recommend that you have to try venturing on something else.
Through ethical link building, your site can gain a lot of relevant links that would bring your site on top of the search engine results pages. Link building methods include social bookmarking, blog posting and commenting, forum posting, directory submission, and guest posting.
Here are the specific advantages that your site can get with ethical link building:
1. Link popularity from Anchor Text/Links
2. Higher PageRank/ Site Authority
3. More Direct Web Traffic
4. Deep Search Engine Indexing
5. Lead in the Search Engine Listing/Competition
I would like to reiterate that the benefits enumerated above can only be attained with ethical link building methods. Unethical link building tactics which are called spamming would have your website penalized by the search engines.