With experience, every diligent webmaster conjures up a list of on-site best practices that help websites occupy a top rank on popular search engine pages for relevant keyword phrases. Search engine rating and ranking of your website is highly influenced by linking structure, Meta tags, image alt tags, unique content as well as page load time.

Regardless of the on-site factors usually focussed by webmasters, the most effective technique that can be applied to raise your organic search traffic is the effective implementation of an intelligent link-building startegy. The tactics is quite simple; as you have more relevant links pointing to your site from other domains, it will have increased opportunity of ranking higher for your target keyword phrases.

But if you are an off-site SEO novice, just thinking of link building could be quite intimidating. Given the wide range of options for achieving linkbuilding, do you know the result-oriented ones? Bear this in mind; it is not just the mere quantity of links that aid in pushing your website to the top positions for your target keywords, the quality of pages linking back to you also count.

Below given are 5 proven link-building techniques that are counted among the most consistent and highly effective practises by web-experts who have spent several years on search engine optimization. Although these five are not the only ways to generate links that point back to your blog or website, they are the most effective and have been proven to work on a wide range of sites. Remember, it is important not to limit yourself to a particular link building technique and to not stop from exploring novel online sources to generate greater an relevant backlinks.

• Article Marketing

Numerous webmasters use article marketing quite frequently to build relevant follow-up-links back to the domains; however, it is usually not performed effectively. Undoubtedly, original articles publishing on marketing sites create applicable links back to your domain; however, the articles on their own seem to have very minute search engine authority... in other words, there is need to publish numerous articles so that you can make significant difference. If your articles are well-written and beneficial to your target audience, it is most likely that some webmasters will pick them up and publish them again on related blogs. This will generate more links pointing back to your domain from other websites.

If you want to achieve limitless success with your article marketing, have a sound plan to publish numerous articles monthly while ensuring that you include the URL to your WebPages in the resource box. The popular article directories to publish your articles are Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard, ArticleBase and SearchWrap.

• Related Link Exchanges

Be careful to observe that ‘related’ or ‘relevant’ is used to qualify link exchanges. The notion of some people that link exchanges have been made unproductive for accomplishing SEO by search engines is not true. Provided that link exchange is achieved between related sites and is not excessively done, you can attract substantial authority using it.

Before suggesting exchange of links, it is wise to establish professional relationship with webmasters that their sites are related to yours. Participate actively in your online niche community; submit guest posts, leave comments, interact with bloggers and remember to make reference to your website at the right time. With this, it becomes easier to convince webmasters to exchange links with you.

• Guest Blog Posts

If you use this tactics appropriately, it has the potential of becoming the top influential off-site SEO tool for achieving link-building. The challenge with guest blog posts is that it is difficult to come forth with a result-oriented guest blog post, it is even easier to achieve link exchanges, article marketing and directory submissions. This technique ensures a much higher quality link to your website but with much effort.

If you want an influential blogger to accept your content for guest post, you must make it relevant, valuable, and it should be thoroughly written. You can also achieve result by submitting your guest posts to less popular, smaller blogs. My Blog Guest is a valuable community online that can help you come across other bloggers that would want to work with guest posters.

• Embarking on a Website Contest

Another effective tactic for building links is to give away gifts or prizes to those who visit your site regularly – it is effective both in performance and cost. Although prize or cash award is a huge no-no with the search engines when it comes to link building, it can be an effective avenue for motivating your fans to visit your site and tell others about it.

Instead of giving out monthly prize to a person that links back to your website, it is better to make it an entry requirement for the person to just talk about your site somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the contest participants talk about your domain on their Facebook profiles or blog, they will still build recognition of your brand and generate links for you on the long run.

Remember to advertise the contest on some free contest forums online; examples are Contest Blogger, About Blog Contest as well as Lucky Contests. Don’t think for a moment that it will require a very expensive price to lure people into participating. Simple items like books, fun trinkets and t-shirts can attract user interaction.

• Submitting to Authoritative Directory

One of the standard SEO link building tools that has existed for a long time is directory submissions. A massive number of directories online will link to your website without charging you any money. The only challenge is this; the technique has been made less effective by search engines as a result of link building abuse.

However, site submission to few relevant and renowned directories remains a great way to build a profile of back-links. Webmasters with extra bucks should think of submitting their sites to authoritative directories such as Yahoo Directory and a few others. It is a guaranteed way of generating quality links back to your site.