By David S Baxter
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 dramatically improve your rankings in the search engines.

There are commercial services out there that sell and trade links between members and can generate a large number of backlinks, but doing this type of activity actually hurts your rankings on the search engines. As the search engines discovered this was happening, they started to penalize any websites that participated in this practice because it really wasn’t a relevant indicator of a website’s content or quality. So it is much wiser to generate a handful of legitimate one-way backlinks than to trade or purchase backlinks via these means. There are seven wise steps you can take to generate legitimate, organic, one-way backlinks for your website.

1. Market Articles Online. No matter what your website sells or is about, you can write-or have someone else write-informative articles that can help your potential customers with a problem or situation. People are always looking online for solutions to their problems, so these kinds of articles get lots of readers. When you write and publish articles online, you can get lots of backlinks coming to your website to learn even more.

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. Create and Market Videos. You can also create interesting and helpful videos about the topics you deal with on your website and then publicize your video. The more people that watch your video, the better results your website will get. And the more they pass your link to that video along to their friends and contacts, the more backlinks you can get which will raise your rankings in the search engines. You can get lots of great backlinks to your video via a newsletter, reference to it in a blog or a forum, etc. You may even be able to include your link in your signature when you respond to posts on other people’s websites and forums-just be sure you check the rules first.

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. Utilize Social Bookmarking Sites. Utilizing social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg.com, and stumbleupon.com, you can also generate some good backlinks. Whenever you submit a link back to your website on these services, visitors will see your link when they are looking for information and may opt to visit your site. They can also go to your videos and give you a positive mark for being a quality website with quality content. The more feedback you get, the more viewed your video will be and the better the backlinks you will generate.

4. Use Squidoo Lens. Similar to the article sites listed above, Squidoo publishes content you submit. However, in this case the content is called “lenses” and includes video, pictures, and text. You use a multimedia approach to share information and garner readers. You can create lenses about many topics-such as your business or specific products. These lenses will help generate backlinks and traffic to your website.

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. Use Social Media Sites. You’re probably already familiar with these sites. Social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, DeviantArt, and others. Using sites like this and creating pages for you and your business is very effective in getting backlinks and higher search engine ratings-as long as you keep them current so people don’t forget about you. Also remember that you need to stay professional on these kinds of sites even though they are often used by teens and young adults that may be very irreverent in their communications among themselves. You still need to put a professional image on your business and website.

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!

Everyone is talking about optimization a website for Google. Sure, Google does own a big chunk of the traffic. And they tend to deliver more traffic than everyone else. But don’t forget that there are other major players around, such as Yahoo. Although Yahoo doesn’t deliver as much traffic as Google, it is still able to send highly targeted traffic. 10% of traffic coming from Yahoo is still 10%. The traffic is still worth something. For sure, 10% is better than nothing. So what do you have to do to rank well in Yahoo?

Tip 1: Well organized links.

Unlike Google, Yahoo pays a lot more attention to the internal structure of your website. External links still count, but that is not the main emphasis. You can have a site ranking well in Yahoo with just a few back links. But if your internal linking structure is disorganized, you are going to find it hard to rank well in Yahoo.

Being well organized means you must have a clear linking structure. Try to adopt the hierarchical structure. Also, include a site map to ensure that Yahoo crawls and indexes all the web pages.

Tip 2: Use anchor texts for Internal links.

When creating links, make sure you use proper anchor texts for your internal links. Your anchor texts must contain your target keywords. For instance, if you link to another page on your site, and that page is about “traffic generation”, then your anchor texts must say “traffic generation”. In addition, internal links allow search engines to find your content more easily.

Tip 3: Use primary keywords in title tags.

This works for Google as well, but it’s very important for Yahoo. Use your primary keywords in the title tags! With this little tweak, you can easily move to page 1 or 2 of Yahoo. Yahoo looks at your page title as well as your Meta tags closely to determine the theme of your site. Make it easy for Yahoo and you will be rewarded with higher search rankings.

Tip 4: Use search engine friendly URLs.

Forget about fanciful URLs with query strings. Use search engine friendly URLs that contain your main keywords. Most of the open source CMS does this for you automatically. If you are not using a CMS, just rename your static HTML files with the keywords in the file names.

Tip 5: Write naturally, and post high quality unique content.

Yahoo places a lot of emphasis on relevancy. Don’t bother to stuff keywords in your content. Instead, write naturally, as if you are writing for a human reader. The quality of the content is very important. If you can post unique content that is valuable, Yahoo will love your site!

Tip 6: Be patient.

Finally, be patient. Yahoo takes a lot longer than Google to index a site. Some webmasters have commented that it takes as long as three months for an entire site to be indexed. If you have a site with a clear and concise linking structure and high quality content, all you have to do is to be patient and wait for Yahoo to index all the pages.

Yahoo search engines looks for site with most relevant content, make sure your website is constructed and well structured to provide most relevant information. Inbound link is not what yahoo search engine looking for. Fatcow hosting now with search engines submission tools and marketing service, go to our Fatcow review for more details.