Any website can stuff a page full of keywords. But only legitimate sites—or so the reasoning goes—will actually have lots of other sites linking to them. Backlinks, then, become essential in Search Engine Optimization and website development.

But how do you go about getting them? Who are the best sites to get them from?

One of the best ways to get backlinks is just to ask for them. You might offer to exchange links, placing a link to their site on your website in exchange for a link to your site on theirs. Having strong content is another good way of increasing backlinks. People will naturally link to you if you have content that they want to recommend. Strong content is the only way to get links in SMO (Social Media Optimization, using sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and other popular 'social sites' to increase your traffic).

The best sites to get backlinks from are, of course, those who have high page ranks themselves. Some webmasters use the Google toolbar to see just how high any given site ranks, but most Search Engine Optimization experts advise against this. The toolbar is not necessarily up-to-date or even accurate.

The best way of finding sites that you want backlinks from is simply to go to a search engine (and different search engines will have different results, so do this with as many as you can) and input the search term you want. For example, if you want people searching for "Orange County Website Design" to find your website, input "Orange County Website Design" into a search engine. Look at the top 20 pages (the top 50, if you have the time). Do any of them look like sites that might be willing to backlink to your site?

Go to each site in turn and find the webmaster's email address. Send them a quick email, briefly describing your website (one or two short paragraphs, please!) and asking if he would be willing to backlink to it. If he doesn't have that authority, he should know who does, and he should be willing to put you in touch with them. Be willing to exchange links if the website requests it, unless they're a site you wouldn't want to link to. If the site looks suspicious, don't try to get a link from them to begin with.

Requesting backlinks this way ensures that the sites that link to you will have high page rank for that keyword. And it gives you almost unlimited resources. The top 50 search results in 10 search engines will give you 500 pages to query, and that's just for that one keyword! Inputting a different keyword will no doubt change the order of sites a bit. Lower sites may rank higher, and higher sites may rank lower. Plus, it may bring up completely new sites. Some sites that rank high for "Orange County Website Design" will also rank high for "Orange County Web Design ". But some sites that rank high for "Orange County Web Design" may not have shown up at all in your quest for "Orange County Website Design". Yet both sites would provide valuable backlinks to your site, which promotes all aspects of web design services in Orange County.

Getting backlinks is a huge and time-consuming process. It is, however, one of the most valuable things you will ever do for your website's Search Engine Optimization.