If you want your site to rank well in the search engines you need an effective link building strategy. The search engines like to see links pointing back to your site, the more links they see, the more important they think your site is and the higher your site will rank. But you don't want just any old links. The best kinds of back links are links with relevant keywords.

Link building needs to be an ongoing part of your search engine optimization strategy, the more back links you have the better. But don't rush and suddenly get thousands of links pointing to your site, you need to grow your back links naturally.

It seems more natural to get a few back links every day than to suddenly get thousands of back links overnight. The search engines watch for unnatural patterns, and if they think you are trying to manipulate them, they will drop your site from the search results.

The one thing you don't want to do is give the appearance of anything that looks contrived. Resist the temptation to buy thousands of links, exploding your link popularity overnight will get your site penalized.

How do you get back links to your site?

There are many ways to get back links:

Develop relationships with other webmasters to get reciprocal links from related sites.

Involve yourself in forums related to your niche and include a link to your site as part of your signature file.

Create Squidoo lenses or HubPages with a link back to your site.

If you have a blog, add your blog feed to your Squidoo lens or HubPage.

Write articles for article directories and include a link back to your site in the bio box or author's resource box.

Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark your pages and encourage your visitors to do the same.

Use Twitter to send a 'tweet' when you post a new article.

Create profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Naymz and include links to your site

This is not an exhaustive list; it is just to give you idea to get you started.

Get lots of back links using relevant keywords

How you link is important. Create anchor text using keywords for your back links when you can.

Anchor text is a clickable link, it is simply the text used to link to your site. The search engines use this text to help them decide what your page, is about. So, when possible, choose what the anchor text will be and make sure it includes your keywords.

You want to use both your main keywords, and variations of your keywords. Try to vary the text you use to link to your site so that it looks natural. And remember that each page on your site ranks for its own keywords so the keywords you use when you link to a specific page on your site won't necessarily be the same as when you link to your home page.

You won't always be able to specify the anchor text, but make sure you seize the opportunity when you can.

Reciprocal links are the least valuable but it won't hurt to have a few reciprocal links from a few well chosen sites. If you swap links with another site, make sure you say what you want your anchor text to be.

When you create Squidoo lenses and HubPages, or create your forum signature you have full control over your anchor text. Create links using variations of the keywords you want the page to rank for.

Link building is just one aspect of search engine optimization, but it's an important one, so create a link building strategy and keep on building links to the pages on your site. You will see an improvement in your search engine rankings and an increase in the traffic to your site. Building back links is well worth the effort.