As a website owner, you’re probably familiar with the term SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization). You probably know this relates to how you set up and wrote the content for your website so that it would get high rankings on the search engines. But did you know how much backlinks contribute to the success of your website? Lots of quality one-way backlinks-meaning links from another site to yours for a legitimate reason-help improve your rankings in those search engines.

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. 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 online sites that specialize in offering these kinds of informative articles. Ezinearticles.com, eHow.com, and goarticles.com are just three of these sites. You can put your article on these sites where people will find it easily, along with a resource box telling a bit about you and your business and usually include at least one link back to your business website. Some places even let you include links in your article text.

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.

Some website owners also announce the release of new videos on their website via Twitter. Twitter is a tool that lets you use short messages (no longer than–0 characters) to make little announcements-and that can include links. Many, many people use Twitter as a resource, so this can be highly effective.

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. Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is a site that is a little like the articles sites mentioned above, but it’s different in some ways. For example, rather than articles, Squidoo publishes what it calls “lenses.” The idea is that you’re an expert on something – everyone is – and that by using text, photos, and video, you can use your lens to focus on information and share it with a huge readership. You can write a lens about your business. Then perhaps you can write more lenses about individual items you sell. You can link all these lenses together to maximize the traffic you drive to your site and encourage backlinks.

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. Submit Your Website to Directories. Similar to search engines, directories list websites based on their relevance to a keyword or keyword phrase. However, directories are more subjective because they are evaluated by real live site editors who decide how applicable a particular website and its content are and decide whether or not they will include the listing for their readership. You should definitely submit your site to the appropriate directories, being very careful to submitting it for the correct category or subcategory and to following all the rules and guidelines to be sure your website gets the best possible chance of being included. Again, listings in directories generate valuable, high quality one-way backlinks that are beneficial to your search engine ratings and will draw traffic to your website.

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.

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!