Backlinks - Inlinks - One way links… Whatever you choose to call them - One thing’s for sure - In off page SEO, Fundamental to getting that prominent SERP Ranking, are the links pointing to your web pages from other web pages across the internet.

But - In the head long rush to out-backlink your competitor or achieve the coveted Google - page one - position one, remember this – all links are not created equal…

How many times have we seen site A with less (reported) more about this later), links placed higher than site B with more? The reason… quality is valued above quantity – Although of course, quantity definitely matters.

Simply put, the links pointing to site A are deemed more relevant than its competitors. Relevance and quality as we all know are candy for Google.

The problem arises, that on seeing their competitors with several thousand back links most automatically think big numbers, panic and rush off to gather as many random links as quickly as possible, and for a while things go well enough.

A few posts on forums, a few blog comments, one or two articles with signature links etc… and then upon realising the enormity of the task, many simply give up, and look for less involved forms of online distraction.

The above methods are all perfectly valid, as is submitting to social media and directories, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Dmoz etc.

The problem here is one of Time, Commitment and (considerable) Effort...

Let’s back track for a moment and discuss another important fundamental, keyword choice. Unless your campaign is already well underway - The first thing I would urge you to consider is keyword/competition. Investing your time wisely here will save you time and effort in the following stages - simply because competing for highly competitive keywords, such as "make money online" is a very different task to competing for say "home made chili recipes" – so keyword selection/competition would be my first consideration.

Naturally you will want to know exactly how many backlinks are needed to get you to Google page one! You will enter "backlink checker" into Google, yahoo or Bing and enter the URL of you competitor… bingo!. You see they have 1000 backlinks pointing to their site and agree with yourself to build 1001! …

But - be warned. All of these backlink checking tools will not give you an accurate count. They cannot, and the reason is simple. They themselves do not have access to accurate data. Because they are receiving their data directly from the search engines who purposely do not give full accurate figures.

Search engines such as Google openly admit to giving only a tiny portion of the true number of backlinks pointing to any site, thereby further protecting their algorithm. you may check this for yourself on Google official webmaster information. Yahoo also has a similar policy, but they do give a higher proportion of the true number.

Ok, so you understand that just acquiring (buying, building) crappy links form here there and everywhere just to make up numbers is not the intelligent way forward.

Two important factors as far as SEO is concerned are Quality and Relevance

Quality is measured in several ways; Backlinks from authority sites have a high value. Page rank - PR, of the link providing site is another value factor. High ranking sites obviously being of more value to you than lower ranking sites - both are increased in value by relevance. Relevance - being the close relationship between the subject matter of your site and that of the link providing site.

If your site is about dog training and you have a dog training PR 7 site linking to you… well that’s good…you want the majority of sites linking to you, to be niche relevant to your website/pages. This then elevates the value of those links.

Lastly let’s briefly cover the importance of anchor text in your inbound links - Anchor text being the hyperlinked text that your visitor clicks on from the remote site that brings them to your site.

You will want your Main Keyword as Anchor Text.

Using the previous example of dog training if the main keyword you are optimizing for is "dog training" and the hyperlink that brings the visitor to your site is "dog training", then you have a highly relevant link, (from a highly relevant site), as the anchor is describing the topic of the page to which the person clicking the link on it will be sent.

My final point is this - link building doesn’t have to be a chore I know many of you loathe the idea of continuously trawling forums for ways to leave comments or searching endlessly for blogs that are not "nofollow ". Well, I don’t do any of that as a link building strategy. I like to, as much as possible automate my businesses, and I like elegant solutions - in short I use software and tools to work for me, turning one simple action into 60 plus niche specific inbound links to any of my sites or pages.

When it come to Building Back Links it couldn’t be easier.

If you’re looking to build safe, natural, unlimited, niche relevant one way back links - for free I’ve put a link here to point you in the right direction…

I wish you every success