Anyone who owns a website should be familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Effective SEO ranks your website high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of the major search engines including Google and Yahoo. One tool that helps get your website high rankings is backlinks. A backlink is a link going from someone else’s website to your website. These are most effective when they are one-way backlinks-meaning it is not a link swap, but rather, another site is linking to yours for a legitimate reason, even though you do not have a link going from your site to their site in return.

There are commercial services out there that sell and trade links between members and can generate large numbers of backlinks, but doing this type of thing actually hurts your rankings on the search engines. As the search engines discovered this was happening, they started to penalize any websites that participated in this practice because it really wasn’t a relevant indicator of a website’s content or quality. So it is much wiser to generate a handful of legitimate one-way backlinks than to trade or purchase backlinks via these means. There are seven wise steps you can take to generate legitimate, organic, one-way backlinks for your website.

1. Market Articles Online. No matter what your website sells or is about, you can write-or have someone else write-informative articles that can help your potential customers with a problem or situation. People are always looking online for solutions to their problems, so these kinds of articles get lots of readers. When you write and publish articles online, you can get lots of backlinks coming to your website to learn even more.

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. Create and Market Videos. You can also create interesting and helpful videos about the topics you deal with on your website and then publicize your video. The more people that watch your video, the better results your website will get. And the more they pass your link to that video along to their friends and contacts, the more backlinks you can get which will raise your rankings in the search engines. You can get lots of great backlinks to your video via a newsletter, reference to it in a blog or a forum, etc. You may even be able to include your link in your signature when you respond to posts on other people’s websites and forums-just be sure you check the rules first.

Some website owners also announce the release of new videos on their website via Twitter. Twitter is a tool that lets you use short messages (no longer than 140 characters) to make little announcements-and that can include links. Many, many people use Twitter as a resource, so this can be highly effective.

3. Social Bookmarking. You can encourage backlinks with Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com. With sites like these, you can submit a link to your website, and people visiting the site will see it when they look for new information related to your website. Not only can they easily visit and watch your video, they can “second” your submission by vouching for it as having good content. The more people who see and like your content, the more prominent the link to your video will become, and the more high quality backlinks you’ll earn.

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. Use Hubpages. Like Squidoo, Hubpages lets you create entries with video, photos, text, and links. You set up an account, name your Hubpage, add tags, and create pages about all kinds of different topics. The more Hubpages you make, the more you look like an expert, and the more backlinks you can get.

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.

These seven tips for generating one way backlinks, implemented consistently, will help your site gain many valuable one way backlinks. The more genuine backlinks your site has, the higher it will rise in search engine results. And that is the best way to drive traffic to your site and help your business grow.

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!