We have repeatedly said that there is no magic solution neither a golden handbook to follow and guarantee high search engine rankings.

However, there are few factors that are considered as very important and also fundamental to the search engine optimization “techniques”. The main factors can be the age of the website, the domain name of the website, the content of the website, the coding of the website and the number of backlinks that the website has.

For those of you new to SEO, backlinks are links that are directed towards your website; also knows as Inbound links (IBL). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity and importance of that website. In this article, I will explain to you what a backlink is, why it is important, and few ways to help you gain backlinks for your website. I will also give you some tips to avoid getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

If your website is competing against other websites that have do NOT have many backlinks, then you can often achieve a good or even top placing just by getting the website content and coding right. If, however, the other websites HAVE got a lot of links, then you also need to build links to your website if you want a good position in the search engine results pages. This happens simply because by having many backlinks, it means people are voting for you! Consequently, when people search for a particular topic or content area that appears on your website, your site will be one of those that’ll appear on the first page of the search result.

However, don’t be surprised if you have paid hundreds of dollars for advertising in websites and purchasing hundreds of “backlinks” from vertical networks (also known as “linkfarms”). “Purchased” backlinks often fail to achieve desired SEO results for two reasons; firstly because the backlink comes from a website with a totally different content from yours. Of course it’s allowed having ads and links from any kind of website, but this has nothing to do with SEO Ranking. Secondly, because Google (and other major search engines) are aware of these tricks and are considering ways of penalizing publishers who attempt to get backlinks in this manner.

The above lead us to the conclusion that there are good and bad, qualitative and poor backlinks. Just having “a bunch of backlinks” is not a good strategy. The backlinks need be from high page ranking (PR) websites (1= low ranked websites , 9=high-pr websites). Firefox users can download the SEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar to check the PR of a website.

You’re probably wondering, “Ok, where can I find these backlinks?”. Here are some tips for growing your backlinks:

1) Social Bookmarking sites: Assuming you have a blog and are regularly publishing quality content, then make sure you are syndicating the content to social bookmarking websites, such as:
# Digg
# Facebook
# Twitter
# Delicious
# RedditThese social bookmarking websites have a very high PageRank and therefore any backlink from such websites is valuable.

2) Directories: It is good practice to submit your new website to multiple directories when you launch. If you haven’t, here are a few free one’s to consider:
# dmoz.org
# alexa.com
# info-listings.com
# scrubtheweb.com

3) Article marketing sites: Like social bookmarking websites, article marketing websites are a collection of articles or blogs about specific topics. Here are few:
# ezinearticles.com
# goarticles.com
# articlebase.com
# buzzle.com

4) Forums or important blogs: Posting and commenting on blogs and forums related to your industry and your website’s category/subject is very good regardless of whether or not you get a backlink. It is anopportunity to interact with your target market and eventually you can use this as a way to increase backlinks.

5) .gov or .edu sites: These websites typically have very high page ranks (6 or above) because of the quality of the content.

Finally, remember to avoid doing anything that appears shady. If you are contacted by a company that offers to increase your backlinks, just ignore it and have a glass of wine. Avoid all links farms and any blacklisted directory.

While Google makes 400-500 updates to their search algorithm every year, the company's most recent noticeable change affected close to 12% of the queries. This update was meant to rank higher quality sites higher in the search engine results, and less useful sites that people complain about (the ones that resemble content farms) lower.

While they haven't really named this change as move against content farms, this is precisely that. Early comments suggest they might discredit value of sites such as directories and article marketing sites, such as exactly what you listed (below):

Also, they might pay closer attention to the bounce rate or time spent on site by your visitors.

Υea, I will agree with you although there are very very new updates from Google's search algorythm regarding linkfarms which I didn't find the time yet to go through their announcement...

Is anyone up-to-date about this ?

I remember having read some similar articles and forums threads last year about Google implementing a new system to find low quality sites with hundreds of pages contents and all filled with PPC or other commercial text links.

It is always cool to write and submit articles, either to your own website or using the main directories, but I personally believe the lengths of contents and text passages would be playing some bigger roles from now on.

I recently read that EzineArticles upped the minimum word count on submitted articles to 400+

That's not going to help them or sites like Yahoo! Answers get better ratings. More words does not mean they'll publish less garbage.

Actually is going to be more garbage... Quality in content is a very big issue and, currently, there are only a handful of Article publishing sites with high quality content...

Yes, here's a nice article I read about Google's latest update, like Artashes mentioned.

http://bit.ly/hGEXWm

pretty good article, very informative..

Have a look at Chris Crum's (WebProNews) articles about the same issue: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/20...sualties-speak

This has always been true, but really brought to the forefront recently.

social bookmarks are pretty much dead unless you use Digg or Reddit.
Article marketing is still VERY effective, you just have to write better content now
Forum marketing still rocks, but you have to REALLY get involved to make a difference in the ranking
just my 2 cents

Article Marketing is still a very very powerful "tool". However I don't think we should underestimate ALL the social media. Every link and publish to the well-known and well-established social site (facebook, dropjack, technorati, twitter, del.icio.us) adds only positives to your website...

(facebook, dropjack, technorati, twitter, del.icio.us)

I agree those are pretty decent, but when you find a service online offering you 100 social bookmarks submission you have to know it wont work, there aren't that many social bookmark sites with decent PR and do follow links...

Backlinks is important in seo as it helps in increase your page rank.

Thanks for sharing this tips with us. Backlinks are important in seo in increase the page rank in Google