One of the most important factors in search engine optimization for your website or blog to rank well is the amount of backlinks it has.

Backlinks are URL links of your website or blog on other websites. The greater the number of backlinks your website has, the higher the ranking when someone searches for your website’s keywords. Having a huge network of backlinks tells the search engine that your website is very popular and is an authority site where people go to for information. Google loves websites like that because such sites give people what they want. Google in turn, puts such websites on the first page of searches. Google also loves to give what people want and that’s why it remains the most popular search engine.

So to rank well in organic searches (meaning free searches and not PPC-sponsored), having lots of backlinks is crucial.

There are a several ways of getting backlinks:

1. Post meaningful comments to blogs that contributes to the discussion. This allows you to put your website URL link along with your comments.

2. Post in forums that are relevant to your website topic with your website URL links in your signature. Some forums do not allow signatures, so be aware.

3. Exchange links with webmasters of related-topic websites. You want to be careful with who you exchange links. Google uses a ranking system called Page Rank where websites are ranked on a scale of 0 to 10. 0 (zero) being the lowest and 10 the highest. If you are ranked 1 and you link with websites with Page Rank (PR) 0, and if there’s a lot of such low PRs, your ranking may be adversely affected. So its better to get a link from a PR3 website then 10 links from PR0 websites.

4. If you have a blog, you can create a buzz by writing some insightful but controversial topic that grabs people’s attention enough for them to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious or simply recommend your blog.

5. Joining social bookmarking websites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, etc. and having backlinks from them.

6. Writing articles with your website URL links in the Resource or Bio-box and submitting them to article directories. Article directories are websites that contains thousands of articles on various topics. These article directories allow your articles to be published by other webmasters with your website URL links intact. So the more webmasters like your articles, the greater the number of websites containing backlinks of your website.

7. Submitting your website or websites to directories. Website directories are websites that list information on websites and well as the URL. Such directories may also contain information on how to subscribe for newsletters.

This list is by no means exhaustive and there are other ways of getting backlinks.
However, I want to elaborate on the last one, submitting your website to directories.

Having great content on your website or blog is absolutely essential if you want to do well in your Internet marketing journey. Assuming you have great content on your website or blog, you have to tell the world how to find it. Website directory is one of the great ways of doing so.

However, submitting your website/s to directories can be pain in the behind. Doing so manually can take a lot of your time and effort, not to mention very boring. Therefore you should make use of software or submitting services for such purposes.

A new piece of software for directory submission has just launched on 26th May 2008. It is created by the duo, Calvin Woon and Jonathan Teng of IM Buzz Creators. IM BUzz Creators have recently created a bunch of viral, buzz-creating software that has Ewen Chia buying and recommending them.

This new software is called Instant Directory Profits and contains more than 1500 free directories that you can submit your website to. This list of directories is updated every month, so this ensures the directories are up-to-date. The Google Page Ranks, Alexa rankings and type of each directory is listed and can be sorted in descending or ascending order.
There are more than 1500 directories in Instant Directory Profits which are free website submission, meaning there’s no need to pay to submit your website to these directories. Roughly 60% of these directories have Page Ranks (PR) of 3 to 8. The rest are PR2 to PR0.

Each website for submission is categorized as project which you create. It takes about 5 minutes to fill in information like personal details about yourself for creating accounts at the directories, and website information like title, description and keywords. One great feature about this software is that it allows you to create different sets titles, descriptions and keywords and rotate them. This way, your website can rank for different sets of keywords.

At a click of a button, your directory account creations as well as website information are entered into the particular directory. However, as each directory is different in content and structure, there is still some manual tuning of the data. But with this software, your tedious task of directory submission is greatly simplified.

To summarize, Instant Directory Profits has:

1. More than 1500 directories with Google Page Ranks and Alexa Rankings listed. This greatly saves you the trouble of searching for directories yourself. This list is constantly updated monthly to ensure validity.

2. Different sets of website titles, descriptions and keywords which can be rotated so your website can rank for different keywords.

3. Easy and simple filling-in of account creation and website information.

If Directory submission is one of your strategy for getting traffic, Instant Directory Profits is an inexpensive method. If it’s not  part of your strategy, it may be time to get started.

By clicking the image below, you can get Instant Directory Profits with a $10 discount. That’s more than 25% off the normal price!