Of all of the traffic that you can get your website, some of the best visitors will come as a direct result of your website being listed in the search engines. Not only is this traffic very targeted, since they are looking for something specific, it is also free, which makes it all the more valuable. In an effort to gain this free search engine traffic, many individuals have begun employing various search engine optimization techniques to help their websites to rank better. These techniques come in two basic forms, on page and off page optimization. Although on page optimization is important for you to understand, it is the off page optimization that will really propel your website to the top of the list.

Although there are many different things that you can do in order to improve your search engine rankings, the most popular and most effective is through obtaining inbound links to your website. These links can take on a variety of different forms and they can come from a number of different areas but some of them are much more effective than others. Let's start at the bottom of the list of links that you can obtain and work our way up to the most effective.

Several years ago, it was very common for individuals to exchange links to their websites. This was a process that is known as reciprocal linking and it helped many people to be able to gain SEO ground within the various search engines. Unfortunately, this pattern of linking was also very easy to exploit and many websites overdid the process until it became almost the useless. Today, the search engines put very little value on a reciprocal link but that doesn't mean that it has no value whatsoever. It should still hold a position in your SEO efforts, just make sure you don't focus entirely on this type of link.

Another type of link is a one-way link that comes from efforts that you make to get listed on a variety of different websites. These can include directory links, links from articles that you have written and links in forum posts that you have made. One of the most popular of these is article marketing where you write articles on topic, post them to the various article directories around the Internet and include a link back to your website. This can help you to gain some ground in the search engines if it is done properly and persistently.

The holy grail of links, however, is a one-way link from a well-established, on topic website. Unfortunately, these are very difficult to obtain as many of these websites will not link out to other sites. If you make your content compelling enough, however, you may get some natural links from these websites. You can also offer to write original content for their website in exchange for a link. What ever it takes to get your link on their site, it is well worth the effort as this will help to propel you to the top.