When a search engine is considering how effective these inbound links are to a website, it is looking not only for the number of links, but for the quality of these links. So a search engine will look at the content on each of these linked websites and decide from that how relevant it is and whether it is a quality link. Inbound links which are from websites which bear more relevance to your own site are credited more highly by search engines. The reverse is also true of irrelevant inbound links.
Search engines are becoming wiser to the efforts of certain deceptive techniques from less than scrupulous developers and so it is becoming more and more difficult to gain credit from inbound links; even more reason why they need to be relevant, quality links.
There are directory sites which you can now visit where you enter in keywords relevant to your own site in return for a list of the best sites with which to link. Creating these one-way inbound links then becomes an easier task and you are more certain of quality links. Some services will now offer you free links for hosting their directory on your own site or you can pay for enhanced link packages.
You don’t, however, need to link back to the websites which are pointing at your site. One-way links are actually more beneficial to your website than reciprocal links. Search engines recognise that one-way links indicate that your website is worth pointing to without expecting anything in return from the other website.
One of the most effective ways in which to promote traffic to your website using backlinks is to submit relevant keyword-rich articles to article directories. You could also participate in forums and leave your website link in the contact details so that it points back to your site.