Absolutely, yes link building needs to be a part of web site marketing strategy.  The question is, which of the dozens of link building strategies should you employ.  There are quite a few different approaches you can take here, and they all have their pros and cons.  It’s a complex question to answer, since not only to you have to consider the effectiveness of the different link building techniques, but you also have to consider the ethics of those techniques.  You see, gaining links to your site by your own efforts is considered by many of the search engines including Google to be artificial and inappropriate.  But really, it becomes quite a gray area with some of these approaches and you may want to check with some good link building services before you start.

What the search engines would have you do, is nothing but create great content for your website.  They believe, that somehow magically through word of mouth people will find out about your site and start linking to it.  Well, I happen to believe that approach is a little bit naive.  I mean, you have to tell at least one person to get the ball rolling.  OK, maybe you don’t have to tell anyone, and the search engines will find you anyway.  Actually, they are getting pretty good at that, ever since they started including registrar information in their search algorithms.  Personally, I see link building as nothing more than marketing and promotion from the old (pre-internet) days.  So go ahead, get some links and spread the word.