Got a website to promote? You may place a huge poster on some billboard at the crossroads, take out an ad in a local newspaper or magazine or give away nice free T-shirts with your website's URL to college students. Oh, and skywriting may be quite impressive as well, especially over the stadium during FIFA World Cup Championship games. But are you ready to shell out pretty penny on this extravagant, but still ineffective ways of website promotion? Trust me, there is far cheaper surefire way of making your website popular. It is SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered to be the cheapest, but the most effective part of Web marketing. Basically SEO consists of onpage and offpage optimization. Onpage SEO deals with modifying the content and the structure of a website, while offpage SEO comprises competition research and link building. The secret of achieving on-line success is in balanced combination of these two optimization aspects. You must get all onpage factors the right way- choose the right keywords and modify with them the actual HTML code of your page; organize your site structure, create site maps, write robot.txt files etc. And don't forget to take care of offpage factors, links in particular.

Links, quality link sources, link exchange, link baiting - the list of similes is endless. But the point is: if your site has lots of inbound links Google spiders think that it is outstandingly cool. So constant working on link building eventually results in high rankings and never-ending flow of website visitors. That's why getting high quality backlinks is number one priority for SEO.

The way you run your link building campaign can actually make or break you in the tricky SEO game. If your link building campaign is well-planned and organized you are likely to achieve desirable on-line domination. But having no game-plan, hitting the top of search results is becoming a dim prospect.

To shape your winning SEO strategy and work out surefire optimization plan read these 6 rocking link building tips.

Directories submission

If you don't want to watch your website getting covered with dust in the doldrums of cyberspace you must start to act, as sitting idly brings no results for SEO. The best proven way to raise awareness of your site is submit it to some web directories. There are lots of them out there: they can be free like DMOZ or paid like Yahoo! Directory. If you manage to get enlisted in one of the reputable directories that works like a calling signal for Google spiders. They crawl the web space to pick up information on recently updated or created links. Directory submission gives you one-way links and in the long run sends you targeted traffic.

Articles Submission

Article submission generally refers to writing articles and posting them in article directories such as EzineArticles, Articlesbase, Buzzle, etc. You are allowed to place links in the body of your article or in author information box. If you write an informative and appealing article that can work out well for your website promotion.

Writing your articles don't forget that they should meet the requirements of article directories, search engines and your target audience. Here are some points to take into account while writing your article:

• The article should have an eye catching title

• The article should be original and informative

• It should be thematically relevant to your website

• It should be keyword-optimized.

One more point behind all this is that articles submission can attract a great number of new visitors (and potentially new links) to your website without incurring hefty expenses.

For more information on link building read part 2 of this article.