Paid link building refers to the practice of paying a website owner for the privilege of including an ‘outbound link’ from his site to one of your web pages. In effect, you would be leasing the ‘outbound link’ space in order to benefit from the targeted traffic acquired by the ‘inbound link’ that is pointing to your web page.
A website owner generally knows the value of his online property. So you can expect to pay pretty handsomely for the opportunity to sit on some of his real estate. This can be a very expensive approach to link building, which is an important aspect of comprehensive search engine optimization because it increases you’re your opportunities to rank high in the search listings by increasing your ‘link popularity.’
Links that point to your web page from relevant, high quality web pages that also have a high ‘link popularity’ help the search engines to understand how valuable your information is in relation to the keywords and phrases for which it was optimized. These ‘inbound links’ serve as a “vote” toward the popularity of your web pages. The more “votes” you have the greater your opportunity to achieve high rankings in the search engine results pages for your keywords and phrases. See ‘Link Popularity,’ ‘Inbound Links,’ and ‘Google PageRank™’ for more information.