Driving traffic to your site is the lifeblood of your online business and with all the different ways you can use to drive traffic like pay per click campaigns, banner ads and such, ultimately you want to be able to drive free traffic so your advertising costs are minimum and you get to keep all the profits to yourself.

But how do you do this?

Ranking high in the search engines. Search engines are the kings of the internet, they receive thousands of visitors everyday and at the same time they are responsible to driving traffic to thousands of other sites and these sites receive all that traffic because they rank high on the search engines. When people search for a particular term on a search engine the sites receiving the most traffic are the ones that appear in the first few pages of the search results.

Most people say the key to ranking high is to optimize your pages with the right keyword density, keywords in your title tag, keywords here, keywords there and all of these techniques work but the one with the most value to the search engines are the links pointing to your site from other sites which are known as backlinks or inbound links.

In the early days of the internet webmasters figured out the search engine's algorithms and they were ranking high for a whole different variety of terms in order to send people to porn sites. Let's say you searched for the word "Golf Clubs" you could easily end up on a porn site even though the search result said otherwise. The search engines needed to come up with a solution to this problem or their business would be in trouble.

They came up with the link popularity system where the website with the most backlinks would be consider more relevant than websites with a lower number of backlinks. Google in particular will give much more credit to websites with a lot of backlinks. So if your site does not have any other sites linking back to your site the chances of receiving free traffic from the search engines will be low.

In order to determine the amount of links pointing to your site you can simply go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites and type in your domain name in the search box, click on explore URL and they'll show you the amount of backlinks you are receiving.

Building backlinks to your site it's extremely important if you want your site to rank well in the search engine and become an authority site. Start building those valuable links today and enjoy the free traffic.