Backlinks are an essential part of the SEO process as they are links that direct traffic, as well as value in terms of the search engines, back to your site. One way to get backlinks is to use social media resources such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+.  However, another way to create backlinks is through web 2.0 sites.

Web 2.0 Sites

There are some great web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo and HubPages that have a far reach and a wide readership. If you publish an article that is interesting and relevant and include your link, you are sure to see a lot of clicks from the article back to your website.  However, do remember to read the sites rules, in case they don’t allow links in the post itself. If that’s the case, you can typically include a link within your biography at the end of the article.

Blog Comments

Another easy way to create backlinks is to comment on blog posts written by others. By comment, I mean write a thoughtful and relevant comment. Don’t write “Click my link” or “Great post” and leave. Most likely, comments like these will be seen as spammy and will get deleted by the admin. Instead, find a few blogs that you are interested in and are similar to your topic and actually read the blog post before commenting. That way, your comments and links will be relevant to your site and they won’t be seen as spam.

Creating these backlinks through article marketing and blog commenting can be done by yourself but again, you can outsource them to someone if you need to save time or don’t like to perform these tasks.

Bookmark Your Site

Bookmarking sites are another popular way to create traffic and get your links out there. Bookmarking is a way to save a site’s link. If you want to save it just for yourself, then you can always use the bookmarking tool on your web browser. But with internet access everywhere, you won’t always be at that particular computer. Therefore, sites have been created for you to bookmark links so you can access them anywhere you have internet access. A step beyond this is that now you can share those bookmarks with others. This is called social bookmarking. There are many social bookmarking sites but here are a few of the more popular ones.

• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Tweetmeme
• FARK
• SlashDot

Once you sign-up for these sites, you can bookmark your new posts and share them with users. The best way to do this is to have a group of “friends” at each social bookmarking site that you share the post with. Then they can share it with their “friends” if they thought it was a good post. This is sure to multiply the number of visitors on your site.

There are numerous other places to get backlinks but these are just a few of the main methods. Plus, not only will you get ‘Google love’ because of these backlinks, you should get some direct traffic from these sites too.