There are two general groupings of SEO techniques, on-page factors and off-page factors. This article is going to focus on the off-page factors, which revolve around backlinks.

Getting a lot of quality backlinks should be a consistent part of your SEO efforts. The more backlinks the better, but you want to grow your backlinks naturally. It looks a lot more natural if you work on getting a handful of backlinks every week than if you suddenly got 10,000 backlinks overnight because you bought them from a link farm. The search engines are watching for these unnatural patterns, and you are likely to be penalized for engaging in such practices.

There are many options available to build backlinks. You can develop relationships with other website owners to get traditional reciprocal links from other related sites. Participate in forums related to your topic and be sure to have a link to your site as part of your ’signature’. Write articles for article directories which include a link back to your site in the ‘bio box’. Create Squidoo lenses or HubPages with, you guessed it, a link back to your site. If you have a blog submit your RSS feed to RSS Aggregator sites, and add it to your Squidoo lens or HubPage. Bookmark your webpages using Social Bookmarking services and encourage visitors or your site to do the same. Send out a ‘tweet’ using Twitter when you post a new article or add content to your website. This is just to get you started, it’s not an exhaustive list by any means.

Now that you know where to get backlinks, the other important aspect is that, when possible, you use good anchor text for the backlnks you create. The anchor text is the text that turns into the hyperlink (it’s often blue, sometimes underlined). This text helps the search engines determine what your website, or webpage is about. So where you can, specify what the anchor text will be. You want to use your main keywords, and variations on your main keywords. Try to vary it a little (that looks natural), while still keeping it relevant of course. Keep in mind that you want to link to other pages besides your home page, and the keywords you use will change based on the specific page that you are building links for.

Sometimes it is not an option for you to specify the anchor text. But don’t miss the opportunity to specify it where you can. If you exchange links with another site, specify what you want your anchor text to be. The other webmaster will probably appreciate it because it saves them time having to decide what it should be. You will have total control over the anchor text when you create Squidoo lenses, HubPages, in article bio sections, and your forum signatures. Use it wisely.

We’ve covered the basics of getting backlinks in this article. By applying these techniques until it becomes second nature and you will see an improvement in both your search engine rankings and an increase in the traffic to your site.

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