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.

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.

Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a “resource box” in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you’ll get backlinks.

2. Showcase Videos Online. You can create your own videos that will create interest or attract attention to generate one-way backlinks to your website, as well. You can tell people about your videos and where they should go to view them in your blog, emails, a newsletter, or even on forums about the topic involved. Of course, you definitely don’t want to spam anyone! So be sure you are following all the rules for any other forums or sites you may want to post to before you include a link to your site.

Twitter is another great way to announce new video content. On Twitter you have–0 characters with which to convince people to click on a link to your site. This can be very effective because of the huge number of people who use Twitter to quickly search for information.

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. Use Squidoo Lens. Similar to the article sites listed above, Squidoo publishes content you submit. However, in this case the content is called “lenses” and includes video, pictures, and text. You use a multimedia approach to share information and garner readers. You can create lenses about many topics-such as your business or specific products. These lenses will help generate backlinks and traffic to your website.

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. Submit to Directories. Directory submission is related to submitting to search engines, only it involves submitting to the directories that evaluate the content of websites before they are accepted and listed. Many sites are submitted, so editors can be very selective. So be sure you follow the directions for submissions to the letter and submit in the proper category or subcategory.

7. Use Social Media Sites. You’re probably already familiar with these sites. Social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, DeviantArt, and others. Using sites like this and creating pages for you and your business is very effective in getting backlinks and higher search engine ratings-as long as you keep them current so people don’t forget about you. Also remember that you need to stay professional on these kinds of sites even though they are often used by teens and young adults that may be very irreverent in their communications among themselves. You still need to put a professional image on your business and website.

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!