Two backlinking tools that won't sully your white hat (too much)

OK, both of the tools and methods I'm about to recommend work well. They work so well that -- disclosure -- I became an affiliate of each of them.

First of all, a primer for those SEO newbs who might not appreciate the critical nature of backlinking your content. Basically, without incoming links, your stuff has no authority. Without authority, content will not be found. Fortunately, a lot of free relevant backlinks are available, and you can get them without being a total cad.

Links provide the easiest way for search engines to determine whether or not people find your content valuable. The problem is that it is possible to build thousands upon thousands of natural looking links to a cruddy site. Of course search engines vet for this and sometimes penalize link builders, but they do not catch all of it and never will. For the foreseeable future, incoming links will represent an important metric of content quality. Reading and rating every one of the billions of pages of content that are added to the web each day is impossible.

There is a cool way to go about link building and a non-cool way. The cool way is to create original content elsewhere on the web and point that content at your main site. The non-cool way would be to post spammy links in forums, blogs, profiles, and anywhere else that will let you.

One of the best ways of creating original content that links back is to use article directories. Unfortunately, submitting one article to one directory won't do it in most cases. You have to submit them to dozens of directories to be effective. Doing this manually is a waste of time because that is not how your competitors are doing it.

Beware of some auto-submission tools -- they can get you sandboxed or even de-indexed. This method is gray-hat only if you provide quality content. It becomes black hat when you spam pablum.

Look into the following two methods:

Method One: Free Traffic System is totally free and has some super-cool features. It's really a good concept, a cool way to spread your quality one-way backlinks. Watch their videos. It's a different kind of system, not a mere bot. They also have an affiliate program. Join it! You can join their "Pro" service for only $37 a month which is a lot cheaper than paying somebody to build links for you.

Method Two: Miracle TrafficBot (yeah, cheesy name but what can you do...) is a submission bot that does a great job of taking one article and making it appear to spread naturally across the web. The advantage of this method over the first one is that it is a one-time deal. You get the software and can use it forever as opposed to paying the monthly subscription. Then again, they don't have a free option, nor the advantages of belonging to what is essentially a community.

Whichever method you choose, please be cool about it and produce articles that are informative, well written and -- whenever possible -- entertaining. The last thing the web needs is more spam.

There is nothing wrong with building relevant links by spreading decent content around. If you are being paid to SEO someone's site, you would be negligent to not deploy effective methods. All's fair in love, war, and business.