When it comes to creating backlinks, quality is key. Even if you have the most backlinks on the net, if they are poor quality, from irrelevant sites with questionable material or SEO tactics, your rankings will be penalized. To make your marketing efforts pay off, you need to take the time to build a quality backlink network that will drive relevant traffic to your site and tickle the fancy of the search engine spiders. Here are 10 ways to gain quality backlinks:

• Use articles directory sites. You can submit articles with relevant content to articles directory sites and include backlinks to your site. Search engines love this type of link because it is one-way to your site, and one-way links from quality content sites show that your website is also quality. The key here is to make sure that your content is relevant. Although writing good, rich content articles is time consuming, don’t waste your time by submitting tons of poor-quality articles. It will only hurt you in the long run.

• Submit your website to a links directory that will establish one-way links to your webpage. Start with the free links directory pages you can find online, and manually submit your webpage to the correct category. You can pay links directory sites to post your website in their directory, but be careful here. You want them to still do it manually – automatic submissions will not help you as much as gradual, carefully categorized submissions.

• In any backlink that you create, wherever possible, use keywords in the link itself. Never use ‘click here’ if you can help it. Instead, insert the link naturally as part of the text of the article. For example, if your website is dedicated to plants that attract butterflies, and your article is on how to create a fantastic butterfly garden, choose some of the words (butterfly garden, for example) as the link text. This is another signal to the search engines that your backlinks are quality.

• Establish your own webpage on Squidoo. You can easily create a page on any topic you’d like on Squidoo, and include links back to your web page. You can even earn some additional revenue through the site’s revenue sharing program.

• Create a free blog on sites like BlogSpot or Blogger. Google actually owns these sites, and scans them frequently for quality content and links. Build your blog over time, submitting numerous posts each week or month, all of them with a backlink to your site. Again, think quality – be sure the content of your blog is relevant to your site.

• Post backlinks on other people’s blogs that allow comments and that discuss topics relevant to your site.

• Set up your own forum on a site that lets you create them for free. You can create topic categories that include your keywords, and post backlinks to your site from here as well.

• Create a page for yourself or your website on Facebook, My Space and other social networking sites. Be sure that you include content on your profile that is related to what you talk about on your website.

• Try to create backlinks that link to your inner webpages, not just the home page. Search engines like to see this level of specificity in your links. Remember, take the visitor to the most relevant information with your backlink and the search engines will rank it higher.

• Finally, no matter which of the strategies you use, establish your backlinks over time. Search engines like to see ‘older’ backlinks as well as ‘newer’ ones. If you suddenly have 100 new backlinks all in 24 hours, the search engines will notice and may either disregard them or consider them as less important when ranking your site.