One-way links to a website are essential to improve its ranking in search engine results pages as well as to help to attract more traffic. The better the quality of the website linking to yours, the higher it will be rated by the search engines. In addition, if the links can be created on popular sites such as blogs, the number of additional visitors could be substantial.

Research

Building a website and having it on the Internet is not enough to get people to visit it. To do that you have to publish the fact that it is available, and make sure that it ranks well in searches for your topic. Having other sites link to yours is the most effective way of achieving both of these objectives. Before you start looking for sites to link to yours, you need to do some research. You know what keywords are relevant to your site, so you should look for other sites using similar words and phrases and see what sites are linking to them. There is software available to do this: search for "backlink checker" to find sites. Once you see where their one-way links come from you can try to get links for yourself. Not all links are created equal: those from .gov and .edu sites carry higher authority with the search engines. You should look for those sites and give them priority in your linking campaign.

Linking

To create the actual link you would use your keyword phrase as the anchor text (the words in the link) and code the link to go to one of your pages. The links need to look natural to the search engines so don't use the same anchor text for every link, vary it from time to time, and don't link all the sites to your home page. A typical link would be <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/webpage.html">Your Keyword Phrase</a>. This would appear as a link like this: "Your Keyword Phrase", underlined and in blue. Other places to add your links are associations to which you belong, such as Chambers of Commerce, trade associations, local business guides and directories. There are also Internet directories that you can submit to--some free and some requiring a subscription. To find general sites to place links, try searches such as "Your keyword phrase" + "add url", "Your keyword phrase" + "add site", or "Your keyword phrase" + "add website". You can also search for the topic relating to your website, plus the word "directory" to find sources.

Additonal Resources

Another way to get links to your website is self-publishing. You should write short articles (300 to 500 words), press releases or white papers and submit them to websites for publication, including your link in the bio or resources section of the article. Once you have articles published you can go to social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com, and add a link to your article pages there--that will drive some traffic as well as giving a one-way link. You should look for blogs and forum groups relating to your subject and participate in the discussions there. Check to see if you can put your link in your signature file, and make sure you make relevant and useful comments so that you are not accused of spamming. If you sign up for these sites you can often include a backlink in your profile page.

Source:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Good times with inbound links

SEOmoz.org: Advanced Link Building Strategies

More Information:

Google Webmaster Central: Links