Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a word that every website owner should be familiar with. SEO means that you have designed and written your website so that it shows up very high in the search engine rankings for searches using the major engines like Yahoo and Google. Backlinks are of enormous importance in the ranking of your website. Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. While links that are “swapped” carry some weight in search engine rankings, one way backlinks from other sites to yours carry more weight.

While there are services that will sell your links, and sites that allow you to swap large numbers of links with other users, these can be seriously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Major search engines are aware of this practice, and when they’re able to ferret it out, they penalize sites for doing it. It’s far better to get a dozen one way backlinks over the course of a month than to purchase 1,000 paid links or make a quick 100 link trade. Fortunately there are many things you can do to organically develop backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine rankings significantly. Here are seven great ways to get high quality one way backlinks to your website.

1. Article Marketing. Suppose you have a website that sells leather cleaning and conditioning products. You want your site to be nice looking and easy to navigate, with a memorable domain name. How do you get traffic on your site without having a big advertising budget? One way is through article marketing. There are a number of article sites that people use every day to learn about topics that interest them or to learn how to accomplish certain tasks.

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. Hubpages. Hubpages is similar to Squidoo in that you use it to make content-rich pages with text, videos, pictures, and links. You create an account, pick a title for your Hubpage, and add tags. Then you add content: photos, text, products, or comments. While you don’t “own” a topic on Hubpages, the more Hubpages you create, the higher your Hubpages ranking will be, and the more you’ll be seen as the expert on a given topic.

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!