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Back links are vital to your SEO activities because search engines generally regard them as indicators of the popularity of your website.  This is only natural because other webmasters may only put your link on their sites if they think that the information found on your website will be helpful to their visitors.  Thus, the more back links your website has, the better would be the rank of your site in the search engine results pages.

Back links have come to be considered as essential components of the SEO process because with their presence, your site has a higher chance of being indexed much faster by the spiders of search engines.  Back links are also helpful in increasing the number of quality site visitors for the long term.  

However, it should be realized it is the quality back links that are taken into account by the search engines and not just any link that leads to your site.  Search engines have already developed algorithms that can counteract the effects of black hat SEO methods used in the past, such as link farms in which no content is available on a web page except for the links.  Thus, a search engine like Google, may only consider a particular back link as a vote for your site if it comes from another site that has the same topic as your website.  Thus, a back link that comes from a website that focuses on a theme that is not relevant to your topic will not be counted when the search engine computes your site’s rank in the results pages.

It is also important to remember when using back links that their quantity should only be allowed to increase slowly over time.  The search engine may consider the website suspect if the number of back links increases too fast.  More and more search engines are considering back links to be important because it would be more difficult for site owners to manipulate them than links that already exist on their sites.  Search engines have also become stricter in their methods of evaluating the quality of back links because of the unethical practices of some webmasters in the past.

A technique that is often used for obtaining back links is to exchange links with other site owners and article submission services.  However, it is important to make sure that you are dealing only with those websites that have similar content as yours or they would have little effect on your SEO efforts.  A better method, although it would require more time, is to make sure that you are posting quality content on your site and to submit your articles to the various directories with tools such as Article Submit Auto.