Building a website is so easy, you can get some hosting, load up WordPress, start writing content and post it up. It can be the world’s best website on any topic you want. And it won’t mean a thing at all unless you get TRAFFIC.

I have started plenty of sites in the last few years, on a lot of different topics. Getting traffic to them has always been the difficult thing. But there is one thing that will get it ranking, BACKLINKS. The number of BACKLINKS is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google and other directory sites to determine the PageRank of a webpage).

Hey don’t get me wrong, its not the only thing that matters, on-site SEO, Keyword research, it goes without saying that great content / or service should be the corner stone of your website, Niche / Authority or otherwise. Generating great content will drastically help you, it provides a visitor the reason to visit, to interact on your site and they will come back if its good content.

Look it’s all part of it, but BACKLINKS can be the difference between success and failure of your site. Here are 6 of the ways, I go about building BACKLINKS :

1. Social networking

I personally hate social networking, I mean I am old school and enjoy interacting on a personal level. But it is absolutely necessary to build a social profile for your websites. Facebook, and Twitter are the minimum you should be on. But there are over 200 well known social networking sites out there.

2. Bookmarking

Bookmarking sites are a little different from social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, its basically when you decide to keep a Web page to look at later, you’re doing something called “bookmarking”. Bookmarks are simply links to sites that you visit frequently or want to keep handy for reference. You can bookmark them locally on your computer or a In a social bookmarking site. If you want to access your collection from anywhere and share them with others, sites like Delicious.

3. Article Marketing

Are sites where once you write your article you can submit to them, usually with a bio and link back to you site.

4. Web 2.0

This is where things get interesting, you basically go to another site like Tumblr, and create a blog related to your niche website content, then link back to your original site.

5. Wiki sites

A Wiki is basically a Content Management System. To understand a wiki, you must understand the idea of a content management system. As complicated as the name might sound, content management systems, sometimes referred to by their initials (CMS), are really quite a simple concept, you essentially load your site up to them, and it provides a link back to your site.

6. Directory submissions

Submitting to directories is a great way to build links and increase your search engine rankings. In semi-competitive industries it can produce great results. If you add article creation and social media marketing into the link building equation then you can achieve great results for any niche you are targeting.

Now, all of that might sound pretty overwhelming, and it can be trust me. Manual link building is great but if you are lets say you are trying to get ranking on a website, that is pretty competitive, you might need to build 1500 back links, well doing that manually can take forever, but there are programs that you can use, like Ultimate Demon, that can seriously speed up that process.