Over the years search engine technology has advanced. Once all you needed was a website and some meta tags to get listed. Now as the search engines and the search engine spammers race against each other to stay ahead, technology has advanced significantly.

As well as keywords, meta tags and content, search engines take into consideration the number of links from other sites to your own. These are known in the trade as backlinks.

And as a website owner and Internet Marketer you want your site to have a very high ranking, and so you need as many backlinks as you can get.

The first method is to join a link exchange program. These can allow you to build a huge number of links very rapidly, but the big problem with them is many of the sites tend to be spammy and junk sites desperate to get to the top of the search engines. Some search engines will penalise you for links to these sort of sites, which is something you want to avoid.

You also want to avoid your links being on link farms - if there are too many external links on a single site then you may again get penalised by the search engines. In these link exchanges you will often find these link farms.

You can also search for relevant sites and manually create links to them. Now obviously this is a painstaking approach and will take absolutely forever.

There are some definite advantages to having backlinks and you want as many as possible pointing to your site. Now in order for them to be most effective, you need to know a trick or two.

Usually when you are link exchanging or writing articles you are in control of the text that is displayed with your link. A lot of marketers will just write any old blurb and then list their website.

Yes, you get a back link, but you don't harness the full power of it. It's like buying a Ferrari and then driving everywhere at twenty miles per hour.

To truly harness this power and drive your backlinks at full speed you need to use what is called anchor text. This is where you have certain words which are a hyperlink to your website. The words you use are your keywords.

For example, if your keywords were "Dancing Elephants" the usual link would be "Visit Michael Angelo's site on dancing elephants at dancingelephants dot com."

In order to really enhance your listing and boost the relevance of your site massively in the search engines, you need to make the "dancing elephants" reference a link to your website too. Your text then contains two links to your website - one being the website address and the other the keywords. Because the keywords and linking directly to your sites the search engines love it because they think your site must be more relevant to those keywords due to the link.