Search engine optimization (SEO) has become more and more difficult as online business continues it’s exponential growth. Ten years ago, SEO was as simple as targeting phrases and words in your content, having a link or two, and meta tags for your website.

Today, SEO is much more complex. Back links, latent semantic indexing (to be discussed in a different article), page optimization, site maps, and otherwise are all important (but unequally so) parts of a SEO strategy. Unfortunately for internet marketers (or anyone trying to SEO their website), the major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, and Google) have not and will not release their algorithms.

In other words, no one actually knows just how important each factor really is except for the search engines.

So, what is a back link anyway?

A back link is simply an incoming link to your website from another website. The other website can be a blog, an affiliate site, or otherwise. So long as they link to you, the search engines will pick it up when they crawl it and credit it towards your website as a relevant backlink. At the moment, back links are probably the single most important part of a good SEO strategy.

However, there are different types of back links (more on that in a moment), and there are many variables in determining just how beneficial that link will be.

Back link variables

Having a million back links to your website may do wonders for your search engine rankings, or it may do nothing at all. You see, back links are only beneficial to you if the search engines consider them relevant. And, in order for the search engines to consider them relevant, they need to be legimate and valid.

What affects the quality of a back link?

• The website it’s coming from. A website with a high Page Rank (PR), or a website that is well established and respected, will carry more weight than an affiliate website, spam website, or new website.
• The anchor text of the link. Back links with your main keywords as the anchor text are more beneficial to you than just a link.
• How relevant the link is. Back links that originate from websites that are completely unrelated to your website are likely to have little effect. Links from related websites pull more weight.

This is why many webmasters begin to pull their hair out as they begin the often long and drawn out process of generating valid back links.

Tips for obtaining valid back links

Before you start grinding your teeth and kicking your computer in frustration, realize that there are relatively painless ways at generating back links. However, as with anything that is free, it takes time and patience. If you have both, you’re ahead of the game!

• Write and submit articles. Submitting unique articles to many directories will give you free publicity as well as a back link. Many internet marketers base their entire marketing and SEO strategy around this.
• Social networking. MySpace and Facebook are great places to meet like minded people. Link to their websites and they link to you - eveybody wins.
• Blogs. Try writing guest content for a blog in exchange for a back link. Or, if that is not allowable, write valid comments and link back to your website.
• Digg/Stumbleupon/Technorati. Joining one (or all) of these communities can become fun and profitable at the same time!

Of course, there are also paid services from private individuals as well as SEO firms. Regardless, ensure that the back links are valid as per the terms mentioned earlier in this article.

Once you get the hang of it, generating back links becomes less stressful and more beneficial. The trick is learning the first time.