Anyone who owns a website should be familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Effective SEO ranks your website high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of the major search engines including Google and Yahoo. One tool that helps get your website high rankings is backlinks. A backlink is a link going from someone else's website to your website. These are most effective when they are one-way backlinks-meaning it is not a link swap, but rather, another site is linking to yours for a legitimate reason, even though you do not have a link going from your site to their site in return.

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. 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.

Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a "resource box" in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you'll get backlinks.

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.

Twitter is another great way to announce new video content. On Twitter you have--0 characters with which to convince people to click on a link to your site. This can be very effective because of the huge number of people who use Twitter to quickly search for information.

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. Become a Squidoo Lens Author. Squidoo is another website that allows you to submit content. In this case, the content can include articles or text along with photos and video, as well. Squidoo calls their information blurbs "lenses" and uses them to focus on businesses, products, or other topics. You can go here, create lenses about pertinent topics, and get backlinks and traffic coming to your site.

5. Create Your Own Hubpages. Like Squidoo, Hubpages lets you create pages containing content to include text, pictures, video, and links. It's easy to do. Just create your own account and get started. You can create lots and lots of Hubpages for different specific topics to get more traffic coming to your website and generate new quality backlinks, as well.

6. Submit to Directories. Directory submission is related to submitting to search engines, only it involves submitting to the directories that evaluate the content of websites before they are accepted and listed. Many sites are submitted, so editors can be very selective. So be sure you follow the directions for submissions to the letter and submit in the proper category or subcategory.

7. Get Involved With Social Media Sites. If you don't already have an account or a business page on the social media sites that are all the rage these days-like MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and DeviantArt, you definitely need to set one up. Don't start so many that you can't keep up with them, though. Maintaining an active involvement on these pages and current content is key to achieving success and garnering backlinks from "fans" of your pages here. Also, be sure to keep your pages and comments professional. Your image is on the line here.

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!