It's well known throughout the SEO industry that quality one-way links are the lifeblood of your rank building strategies. And while quality is certainly an important factor here, so is quantity. There is a myriad of different way to gather these links, some of them ethical and proper, and some of them are less so. The article will cover three of the more reliable and consistent means to develop those one-way links.

The first SEO tactic is Article Marketing. This one has been around for a while, but is still a valid method for obtaining links. The process works by first writing an article that is somehow beneficial to the community at large. What this means is that you must not write a lot of self-promotional drivel. You have to write something that is legible and valuable.

Once the article is written you submit it to various sites around the net. These sites make the article available for others to reprint on their own sites which will, in turn, continue to increase the number of links to your site.

There are some old tricks here that need to be avoided as well. There are a lot of claims by companies that they can automate both the writing and submission processes. However, subscribing to these systems really just makes you that annoying person that spams the submission sites with pages and pages of gibberish. You never want to be that person.

Article marketing as part of your SEO strategies, then, can be a strong foundation, a way of building up a constant stream of new and valid links. And maybe even some traffic.

The next link building tactic is to follow in the steps of your competition. This begins with your keyword research (which should have happened at the beginning of your SEO campaign) and research into what your competitors are targeting. Then you can discover where their links are coming from. And once you've accomplished that task, you can seek out a link from them as well.

Again, you have to be careful and avoid certain behaviors. First, don't just spam-email a number of vaguely related sites. These requests just end up in the junk email pile, if they don't seriously annoy the site manager first. Second, don't beg. Give them a real reason to want to link to you, and it will happen. By offering something of value to the community you are targeting you can naturally encourage the others to link to you just as they did to your competition.

The third SEO link building tactic is to use blog comments. Community is becoming more and more important in the online and Internet marketing worlds. Not only should a company maintain a blog, but they should actively follow other blogs in their industry as well.

In this link recruitment tactic, however, the links should actually be considered a secondary benefit. Just like asking for links, you should be honestly adding something to the conversation at hand. And that means you cna't just jump from blog to blog leaving comments like "great post" or "U R so SMRT." When you leave comments like that you are not fooling anyone. And you might just earn the annoyance of the blogger who could decide to delete the worthless comments.

Other comment etiquette includes always leaving quality comments, i.e. Spelling errors and grammar mistakes won't endear you to potential visitors. When you fill in the name field you should not stuff it with keywords. This is obvious spam. And when you do include a link, use the URL field. That's what it's there for. And just like articles, trying to post the same-but-slightly-different comment again and again or across multiple blogs will get them deleted by most bloggers.

By employing these methods consistently in your SEO campaign you can begin to increase your rankings and develop a strong reputation in the online realm.