If you don't know already, creating backlinks to your website is one of the most important things you can do to effectively market on the Internet. It is essential to building link popularity, Google pagerank, and "white-hat" SEO.

There's no huge trick to getting valuable links to your website. But there are two aspects you must keep in your mind at all times:

1. Value
2. Relevence

Because of the virtual nature of the Internet, finding and contacting good quality "value exchangers", linking strategy traditionally has been a tedious chore for most webmasters.

For every 10 webmasters you contact to exchange links with you'll be luck to get one response, getting the valuable link built is a chore in and of itself. . .

. . . which brings us to the next topic, which is Automated link building. This is never money well spent! Any service willing to take your money to grant you a link is also doing the same for thousands of other naive webmasters. . . this breaks both the cardinal rules of link building.

Google and the other major search engines run off of algorythms, they can tell whether your link is relevent or not, whether it is a quality backlink or not.

The search engines can tell how quickly these "Linking Sites" are building links, what types of sites are being linked to, and the overall quality of the "linked to" sites.

While the search engines do not penalize you (yet) for being "linked to" by shoddy automated websites, you should keep in mind that more than likely you're throwing your money away and wasting your time.

Obviously if you're reading this tutorial you probably have a website and you want to squeeze every last drop out of it. If this is the truth I'm going to jump up on my soapbox for a minute.

Webmastering is about providing value for your targeted audience. Your website should reflect your passion for your subject and a desire to meet the needs of your audience. Google knows this.

Google also knows that when you provide something valuable people will naturally offer something in return. On the Internet this means people will "naturally" link to it.

What do I mean by natural?

• Students will link to it on classroom projects because you're giving away quality information, you've got your facts straight, you've got links to quality resources.
• People will blog about it and link their blog posts to your site.
• It will get mentioned in forums.

There are so many ways to build links to your website it almost boggles the mind. But the true test of a website's linkability is its: good, valuable, content. When you start with a focused theme and build a site that's worth people will know it, and you will be rewarded.

• Here's Wikipedia's enlightening definition of the Backlink Process.

Today with "Web 2.0" technologies this process has become easier and more complex than ever - thus the search engines' algorythms are ever changing and evolving. They can spot value quickly and easily.

This is great news. . . to those of use who're willing to offer their visitors quality targeted information and links to (other) quality, relevent websites. At the same time, this is not so great news to the spammers and "get rich quick" scumbags who ruin the Internet for everyone else.

This organic linking process will seperate the wheat from the chaff because it keeps human visitors in the driver's seat, finding exactly what they want - Good Information.

Stay on the good side of the search engines. Build valuable backlinks to your website by exchanging value with other like-minded webmasters just like yourself.

Find directories that offer free and low cost links. And when your website is earning you enough money, secure the more expensive Directory links, they're well worth the expense.