“Back links” is a term used in internet marketing to mean links from other websites back to your own. Why are back links important? Because the more incoming links you have pointing to your website, the higher relevancy the search engines give to your site in relation to the keywords that people use for searches.

For example, if your site features information on make money blogging and people search online for “make money blogging,” you want your website to be listed in the first spot – or at least one of the top ten spots, if possible. One good way to accomplish that is to build plenty of incoming links using the anchor text “make money blogging”. Anchor text means turning the keyword phrase into a live link so it looks like this: “make money blogging” – as opposed to using a standard URL format like this: www.blogcurry.com.

The HTML code used to create an anchor text link would look like this:

<a href =”http://www.blogcurry.com”>make money blogging</a>

If your website features high-quality information, it’s possible that people will link to your site naturally, but you’ll still want to do plenty of link building yourself too. There are plenty of ways to do this, and below are three of the most popular:

#1 – Article Marketing

There are hundreds of article directories online that are happy to allow a link back to your website in exchange for a quality article on your topic. Using the example above, you could write brief articles sharing tips on make money blogging, and in your author bio box include an anchor text link back to your website. If you write and submit plenty of articles, you’ll be building plenty of quality back links.

#2 – Social Bookmarking

Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, and others allow you to post links to your favorite sites, and your own can be one of them. Even better, if other people like your site they can bookmark it too. If you offer high quality information, you could even enjoy a bit of viral linking as people pass your link around.

#3 – Satellite Blogs

Beyond your main website or blog, you can also create smaller, niche-focused blogs that feature your articles and several anchor links back to your main site. Some of the better known blogging platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress.com are easy to use for this purpose.

When possible, try to create back links on websites that rank well in the search engines. A link from a site with a Google PageRank 6 will carry more weight than a link from a site with a PR 2. The more popular and older the sites you can find to link from, the better.