One of the keys to improving SEO is backlinks to your website. There is some debate about how important backlinks are. But there is no debate that Google Webmaster Tools still counts links to your site. Therefore, they are very important!
Backlinks in the most basic sense are links to your website from other websites. Google will give your website a ranking boost if you have backlinks from other sites. The more you have, compared to your competition, the better. But, as with all things SEO, the kind of backlink you have is even more important than collecting as many as possible.
What has changed with backlinks and SEO is the quality of backlinks. Several years ago you could go online and buy backlinks to a site. For a fee, your website could suddenly have hundreds or thousands of links from other sites. Google became wise to websites trying to manipulate its algorithm by using this method and started to penalize said sites.
Quantity is still important, however quality + quantity = the best results for your website! For example, recently I had a client interviewed for an interview for a story in USA Today. USA Today posted the story online with a link to my client’s website. Because the USA Today is a popular website, it is a very quality link.
Lower quality links like social bookmarking is still done today, although it doesn’t yield the same results. SEO techniques using social bookmarking should look for the right social bookmarking sites. A website like Reddit picking up your blog post, for example, is better than the hundreds of fly by night social bookmarking sites.
Another great way to get quick backlinks to your website is to link your published content on social media. Pinterest and Tumblr are especially noted in Webmaster Tools as links to your site. I have an e-commerce client who has over 14,000 backlinks from Pinterest alone because she has sharable content! Google+ (or whatever version it soon becomes) is owned by Google, which means you get a backlink each time you post a link to your website on your business page.
If you are patient and add links to your website the right way, Google will reward you! If you need assistance with SEO please feel free to contact me anytime!