Anyone who is into online writing knows the importance of backlinks to his/her online content. Backlinks are a vital internet marketing tool that can help increase your pagerank when used properly. It is wise to spend some time to understand the basics of link-building. You can then use backlinks and improve your online marketing strategy.

But remember one thing, no matter how much time you invest in backlink building, your content needs to be of good quality. Else, you will lose readers and that of course is something you don't want. So use backlinks carefully and increase your traffic.

A. Creating One way backlinks

1- If you don't want to spend too much time creating backlinks, then this is the option you need to use. One way backlinks are easy to get/create and they serve the purpose.

2- Submit your article links to popular social networking and bookmarking sites like stumbleupon.com, digg, reddit, twitter etc. You can also submit you article links to good article directories like pingomatic.com.

3- At the beginning, this may take you some time. But the results will be seen, as the number of backlinks increase.

B. Creating Two way backlinks

1- In this type of backlinking strategy, your site/blog and another person's site or blog come into the picture. 

2- If you want to improve your online marketing by using two way backlinks, you need to research and identify sites/blogs that are similar to yours. For instance, if you have a 'Health' site, search Google to find other health related sites/blogs with a good pagerank.

3- Check to see if the site you have you selected is active, and that it has been updated recently.

4- Start commenting on the site. Leave genuine comments and do this for a few weeks. Then get in touch with the site owner and ask him/her to include your blog/site URL on their site. You then need to do the same for the other site owner. Hence, this backlinking is called "two way backlink". You can get such two way backlinks with several website pairs. But this is time consuming.

Important Warning: When you are creating more backlinks don't ever spam sites, blogs or forums. Always carry out link building on sites and forums that are relevant to your content. Else, webmasters and search engines may take note of all the spamming and penalize you. So be wise and don't over use this link building strategy.