Many new Internet marketers want to drive traffic, but they are not sure how to go about doing so. On the Internet, there are many different ways to drive traffic. Since major search engines account for a large percentage of traffic, many marketers have turned to SEO (search engine optimization). This is a process of building links on a regular basis so that the pages on a website get higher rankings in the search indexes. The higher the rankings, the more traffic a website will get.

The entire search engine optimization process consists of two components - off-site factors and on-site factors. On-site factors are easier to implement, and involves changing elements such as page title, meta tags, etc. of the web pages. The main challenge lies in off-site factors.

Off-site factors involve building relevant one way back links. A link from an external page is considered as one back link. The links have to be from relevant pages. Each link counts as a "vote" in the eyes of the search engines. The more back links (or "votes") that a website has, the higher it will rank.

Knowing this, Internet marketers will go to great lengths to build relevant one way back links to their web properties. There are many ways to build back links. Two of the most popular methods are social bookmarking and article submission.

Social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking sites are community based sites that allow members to bookmark or vote for their favorite content. They can add friends to their own network, and whenever they add a new bookmark, their friends get to know about it. They may then give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down if they want to. Content that gets the most number of positive votes are give a lot more exposure by the social bookmarking sites. This leads to more traffic for the content site.

If the content is really good, links spread really fast through social bookmarking sites, mostly by word of mouth. Eventually, the links may even end up in blogs, forums, and other websites. This is why many bloggers and webmasters like to build links using social bookmarking.

Article submission.

Article submission is another great way to build relevant one way back links. Quality articles are submitted to well established article directories. In exchange for the content, the author is allowed to add two or three text links at the end of each article. Authors can submit as many articles as they want. The more articles they submit, the more back links they get.

Article submission is not something new. It has been around for years, and article marketers who have diligently used this method to build links have enjoyed high rankings in the search engines for a very long time. This is a link building method that has withstood the test of time. To this day, article submissions still work very well.

When you combine social bookmarking and article submissions together, the effect is a powerful one. A new website can get great rankings in a relatively short period of time because of these link building methods.

If you haven't been using them, perhaps it's time to try them out yourself. You will be pleasantly surprised by the results.