SEO is broken down into two main categories, there are the on-page aspects and the off page aspects. In this article we are going to be talking about the off-page factors, which relate to building backlinks to your site.

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. Your website can be penalized by the search engines if they notice it acquired a lot of backlinks in an unnatural way.

There are many options available to build backlinks. You can develop relationships with other webmasters to exchange links from other related sites. Be an active member 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. Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark your pages and encourage your visitors to do the same. Send out a ‘tweet’ using Twitter when you post a new article or add content to your website. These are just a few ideas to get you started. There are many web 2.0 properties and social networks to use in your link building campaign.

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). The search engines also use this text to figure out what your site, or page, 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 the keywords you use when you are linking to a specific page are not necessarily going to be the same as when you are linking to your homepage.

In some cases you don’t have the option of specifying the anchor text. But don’t miss the opportunity to specify it where you can. If you trade reciprocal 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. When you create Squidoo lenses and HubPages, or for your forum signatures you have total control over your anchor text. Use it wisely.

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