As a website owner, you’re probably familiar with the term SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization). You probably know this relates to how you set up and wrote the content for your website so that it would get high rankings on the search engines. But did you know how much backlinks contribute to the success of your website? Lots of quality one-way backlinks-meaning links from another site to yours for a legitimate reason-help improve your rankings in those search engines.

Along about the time web owners discovered backlinks helped raise their search engine rankings, services sprang up offering to arrange for website owners to exchange links to get large numbers of backlinks. Some even offered to generate links for you for a fee. But search engines soon became wise to this practice, and now websites that try to do this to manipulate the search engine rankings higher actually get penalized by the search engines for these kinds of backlinks. It is a much wiser approach to create natural or organic backlinks legitimately than to generate large quantities of backlinks via these methods. And it’s not that hard to do. Here are seven successful how-to’s you can use to get more one-way backlinks for your website.

1. Write and Market Articles. Whatever your website is about, you can write articles about your topic that other people will find helpful. Then you can use these articles at article sites where people are looking for information. This can generate traffic to your website at no cost to your advertising budget.

There are numerous sites where you can place these articles where they will get lots of readers. Goarticles.com, eHow.com, and ezinearticles.com are three such sites that get lots of interest. You can write the article, make it helpful and informative, and then include a link to your website and a brief biography about yourself as the writer in a resource box on the page with the article. With some of these kinds of sites, you may also be able to embed links into the article that can add more backlinks.

2. Video Marketing. If you’re using video marketing, you want the maximum number of people to watch your video. There are many ways to promote your video content and encourage backlinks to it. If you have an email newsletter, that’s a great way to get a link to your video content to a lot of people. Some forums and blogs allow links as long as they are not obvious spam posts, and some even allow you to provide a link to your website in your forum “signature.” Read the FAQs on any forum you consider joining before posting links to your site.

You can also tell lots and lots of people about your new videos by announcing it on Twitter. This is a brief (140 character maximum) blurb announcement service many people love. It’s short, sweet, and easy-and this could generate lots of video viewers and one-way backlinks for your site if you can get a buzz started about your videos.

3. Take Advantage of Social Bookmarking. By now you are probably familiar with at least some of the social bookmarking sites that are gaining in popularity. You use them to submit links people can use when they are searching for information on a particular topic or issue. These bookmarking sites include places like stumbleupon.com, Digg.com, and del.icio.us. You can also get ranked positively for having good quality content people can use, and this will generate even more web traffic and backlinks for your site.

4. Become a Squidoo Lens Author. Squidoo is another website that allows you to submit content. In this case, the content can include articles or text along with photos and video, as well. Squidoo calls their information blurbs “lenses” and uses them to focus on businesses, products, or other topics. You can go here, create lenses about pertinent topics, and get backlinks and traffic coming to your site.

5. Create Your Own Hubpages. Like Squidoo, Hubpages lets you create pages containing content to include text, pictures, video, and links. It’s easy to do. Just create your own account and get started. You can create lots and lots of Hubpages for different specific topics to get more traffic coming to your website and generate new quality backlinks, as well.

6. Directory Submission. Directory submission is an adjunct to search engine submission. Instead of just submitting your website to search engines, you should submit it to search engines and directories. Directory submission is different because editors review submissions for quality before accepting it into the directory. These editors have so many sites submitted to them that they can be selective about them. The main thing you should keep in mind when submitting your site to a directory is to follow that directory’s instructions exactly. If you don’t, you’re automatically out of the running, even if your site is brilliant. You must also submit it to the proper category and subcategory if applicable. Next to following submission instructions, this is the most important thing to remember with directory submissions.

7. Social Media Sites. These are the sites you always hear about, like Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and MySpace. These sites allow the sharing of content as well as socializing. If your website or business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it should. Same thing with MySpace. But it is important to know that you need to keep your content on these social media sites up-to-date. A stale MySpace or Facebook page will rapidly disappear from the collective memory. If someone is a “fan” of your Facebook page, they’ll be notified when your page is updated. It is also important to know that even though some of these sites are especially popular among college students and even high school students, your business’s page should retain a degree of decorum. In other words, your page should be made for grown-ups.

You can get lots of one-way backlinks using these seven ideas. Begin with one approach and do it consistently and regularly. Slowly add new approaches as you are able. You’ll soon have higher rankings on the search engines and more visitors to your website!

To really increase your Backlink building, be sure to visit SmartMediaInnovations.com to find out about the best methods available to help your SEO efforts today!

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