One of the main goals in web marketing is increasing the popularity of your website. To achieve this, of course it is very advantageous to be well versed in SEO. When it comes down to it, there’s nothing quite so effective as good optimisation if you want to get higher rankings. It's a large, comprehensive subject, so I'd like to zero in on one tactic I've used to climb higher in the major search engines. Most of you know that the more quality backlinks you obtain, the higher your site will rank in search engine results. Link trades have pretty much died, although I've found a few link trades can still be helpful; however, the holy grail of effective backlinks is obtaining links from high PR industry related websites. (Whatever link trades are available seem to be on sites that have abysmal page rank). To get a backlink from a single-figure page rank site, is very valuable indeed.

We all want those, but they're hard to come by. You can't write a site in your niche and ask for a one way link for free. Some will sell links, but that's about it. You can pick them up organically, where people simply link to your sites because they like your content, but you don’t want to be waiting around for those organic links to happen.
However, I've found a lot of success in obtaining links from SEO-friendly one way link directories. I tend to see the greatest SERPs (search engine results pages) gains on MSN, but I also see increases on Google and Yahoo.
By SEO-friendly, I simply mean links that link directly to your website. They don't redirect through a tracking URL. And while link directories are not as effective as a direct link from a site in your niche, they still help with getting higher search engine rankings.

Getting more and more one way text links through directory submissions is an effective way to build your link popularity. Whether you are looking to do a free directory submission or are willing to pay for the top web directories on the internet, it’s important to subscribe to a directory submission service. Most of them have a free and a paid service. The free service usually submits to a limited number of directories and I have found that they have very little effect. The difference in number of directories between the free and paid service can amount to hundreds, so I would recommend either going for the paid submission, or leave it alone.

There are many, many directory submission services available but one of the very best must be “Web_Master_Haven (Wmhaven.com)”. They come across as a very professional organisation and they guarantee 1700 one-way permanent text links with their paid service. They also offer a social bookmarking service at reasonable rates.

It’s never too late to start building quality backlinks for your website. The investment of time will be amply rewarded. You can be sure your competition is working on it, and any webmaster who is not pro-actively involved with establishing backlinks to their site will eventually lose out.