Article marketing can be an effective way to build your company’s online presence. But to maximize its potential, remember to use Back links.

Back links are also known as incoming links, inbound links or IBLs. Think of them as the reverse of hyperlinks: Hyperlinks take users from your site to another. Back links take users from another site back to yours.

Back links are links received by web directories and websites from other directories and websites. Search engines use them to determine a website’s ranking. That is, when you enter a keyword into your favorite search engine, one way the search engine decides which site is at the top of its list is by the number of Back links it has.

Back links build on quality. If your website is a good one, people will start linking their sites to it. This of course builds traffic to your website and thereby builds your business. The trick is to build Back links to get the ball rolling.

There are good and bad ways to build Back links into your website. The best way is to get quality Back links from websites similar to yours. For example, if you are a financial advisor, ideally you’d like to get a Back links from another financial site. But how do you do that?

The most important factor to remember is that no one will back links to your site if it isn’t any good. Spend the effort to make your efforts really shine.

One obvious way is to find a website that you like in a related field. Ask someone at that site to review your article and consider posting it. If it is quality work, it should be no problem for it to get posted when there is space available. After all, the webmaster there wants quality work on that site too.

One way is to get your article posted in an article directory or to a content exchange program that syndicates material. If your article is syndicated, such as in an RSS feed, your article is summarized on another site, with a Back links to your site. Visitors will then go to your site to get the full article.

Another technique to use is to publish a press release that happens to have a link to your website. When the press release is published, visitors will then use the Back links. However, be aware that press releases are intended to publish newsworthy events. If there’s nothing newsworthy it will be ignored.

When you write a free article for web content, be sure to put a link to both the article itself and in the “bio box” at the end of it. This gives users two opportunities to link to your site, thereby creating a Back links opportunity.

It is important to note that when someone does back links to your site, make sure it is to something directly related to the subject discussed in the link article. For example, if the subject is banking, make sure the Back links goes to one of your articles on banking and not just your website. This will be of greater interest to the visitor.

If possible, offer a newsletter or another offer which will require the Back links user to register his or her email address with you. The whole point of article marketing and Back links is to drive visitors to your company and website. Don’t lose a contact (and potential customer).

Remember that like anything worthwhile, building Back links will take time. It could take several months to get the word out about your article and your website. It sounds like a long time but in article marketing, as with any marketing, the time spent is worth it.

In each of these efforts, remember to refer to sites and directories that have high search engine rankings themselves. What better way to improve your ranking than to link yourself with another high-quality site?

While Back links are important to build interest in your article and website, it’s important to use them correctly. Search engines have become quite adepts at scoping out poor Back links usage.

One of these involves “link farms”. Link farms are groups of several websites that have links to each other, solely with the intent of building their search engine rankings. Search engines frown on these because they do not offer the user real information.

In a nutshell, the best way to get quality Back links in article marketing or for your website is to use quality content and update it regularly. It may take extra effort but it is indeed worth it.