What is more effective in terms of internet marketing - link building to a category or specific article?

Linking to a page that's relevant instead of the category is the best approach for this. Articles will generally place higher in the search engine rankings than the category pages because users are looking for something specific and not a general listing of articles related to a subject. http://www.contributecontent.com allows you to link back to your articles using using your target keywords - if you're using a service like this you should think about deep linking and not just linking to your home page or category.

I would suggest link to your specific page. Search engine ranking sites by page not by whole site. And if you anchor your article to your page in the blog, and then from the article, create another inbound anchor link to your domain name. This creates better linking and boost higher ranking of your sites. I have a few sites doing this and in very short while it can rank very high in google search engine, of course those sites are less competition niche, but still can beat hundreds of thousands and even a few millions site out there. This linking play a part too.

Link building is essential in today's internet marketplace. Without good quality one way links to your website search engines will hardly even notice you. The main purpose of these links is to get higher ranking with search engines when someone types in a relevant keyword phrase. These keywords will send visitors searching for information on a specific topic to your website and allows you gain a new reader or make some money from whatever affiliate program or ad scheme you are running. I’ve recently set up several websites for some friends and link building was my main concern because I needed links for the webpages to be indexed and start showing up in the search engine. I did also use the free ebook course i got here http://tinyurl.com/237cvqj to optimize my list building. hope that helped a little :-)

I never post to categories, only articles. You want your users to find the articles, so post links there. The categories take care of themselves. One option is to use Water My Blog, which will place links to your site. There a million versions of this type of service, so just Google for it and find the one you like.

I'd suggest building links to wherever you would like searchers to land. If your category pages are the most useful, link there - if the articles are most useful, link there. One warning if you want visitors landing on the category pages - some SEO plugins tell the search engines not to index (noindex) category pages. Make sure this isn't the case, or they won't show up in search engines, no matter how many links you create.

If your using wordpress it already has a native ping to search engines for top level and articles. When link building it is best to keep in mind relevance to content on the page. For general directory or top level concepts submit for example you have a Gardening website, submit your Organic category to organic related gardening sites, Garden tools, to the garden gadgets listings. You can also use this url method when commenting on blogs relevant to the topic. Meaning in the signature area use the appropriate URL to top level category. Page specific gets automatically submitted on post by default in wordpress (pingomatic typically) Utilize your social networks ie twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, technorati pages to broad cast specific urls. Hopefully you have the "sexy bookmarks" plug in to allow your readers to help you with page specific bookmarking and sharing which will help you. Also, another tactic is to guest post or share a specific article with a complementary with your topic site. As always in link building use your long tail keywords -that are relevant to the page topic ex: "10 top gardening tools" as your link vs. www.mywebsite.com/garden-tools.