Ultimately if you want traffic from the search engines you MUST get your website listed within the first 20 listings for your chosen keyword phrase, to do this you simply cannot get away from the fact you are going to have to get backlinks to your website. There was a time when building as many backlinks to your websites as humanly possible was the thing to do. If you were trying to rank above competitors in the search engines for a given keyword or phrase one of the factors you looked at was the number of backlinks that site had.  Now, whilst we still look at the number of backlinks a site has when trying to rank above it, amongst many other factors, the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. While this sounds obvious to many of you, you would be surprised the amount of people who are still concentrating on the quantity rather than quality.

Looking For Quality - Develop A Strategy

You could easily spend hours and hours building up 200 backlinks to your website but unless you are looking for quality then you may as well be shooting an arrow in the dark, you might eventually hit the bullseye but it will take you a long time and a lot of wasted energy. Whereas if you look for the RIGHT backlinks then 20 relevant, quality links will have just as much, if not more, effect on your rankings than your 200 poor quality backlinks.

There should be two 'kinds' of links you aim to build, the ones you build and the ones others build for you.

The ones you build - Variety Is Key

These are the links you physically go out and build yourself OR pay an assistant to build for you. All the time you should be looking to gain backlinks from a VARIETY of sources over a period of time and not just concentrating on one fast method. Concentrating on several methods will make your backlinking appear more natural and therefore more effective in the long term. There are several methods to consider:

• Directories (Not what I would consider quality anymore)
• Article Directories (I only use a handful of high quality directories)
• Web 2.0 Link Wheels
• Blog Commenting
• Forum Marketing
• Social Bookmarking
• Video Marketing

Again, it's very easy just to go over the top with these methods but it's important that you don't, you should aim to get links from websites which are WITHIN YOUR NICHE and therefore highly relevant to your website. Google blogs is a great placeto search if you are looking for 5 or 10 blogs to comment on for a few weeks. There are also other factors you can take into account such as the PR, domain extension (.edu, .gov) and do/don't follow attribute of the website you are gaining the link from but ultimately relevance must come first.

The one's others build for you - Priceless!

These are the backlinks I like the most, in fact I LOVE these types of link and so do the search engines, but how do you get them? The answer is you build a quality website with unique content which appeals to people enough for them to want to provide a link to your website. This is something which has happended to me several times in the last week whereby people have been linking back to a niche website of mine through forum topics. The links have come from different people and in different high traffic niche forums and a couple of high traffic blogs and all links have bought me a tone of quality, targeted traffic. More importantly though this is likely to push up my position in the SERPs, especially considering their anchor text used my primary key phrase. Admitedly you don't come across these sorts of links easily or often but the important thing is that you do come across them!

The concept to remember is quality! Spend more time actually building a quality website and less time trying to fool the search engines that you already have a quality website. Remember quality website, quality content, quality backlinks and quality traffic.

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