I have been writing for a while now, and have come to learn about keywords and how to utilize them to increase the rankings of my site. There's just one small issue. Keywords and metatags can only do so much. I've heard that backlinks are how so many people increase their site's ranking so quickly, but I have no idea what they are, what they look like, or how to start with learning about them and how to use them. Does anyone have any idea as to where to start learning about them? I'd prefer eBooks to read in my spare time, but anything would be helpful.
Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. you'll get it by getting listing in directories like DMOZ , yahoo .You can submit articles to a variety of websites including Ezine and Squidoo.find sites on which you may be able to submit a guest blog. Use PR Networks . there are many ways i'll say just put some efforts on your research.
My best advice is to be on forums such as this one, there's a lot of different tactics to get to the end result. "Blackhat, whitehat, and greyhat". I'd love to tell you about some websites out there but I think it would be breach of these forum policies, google is your best friend.
Participating and reading SEO forums is the best way to learn from experts in the field. Two years ago creating back links was pretty easy. Then came Panda, Penguin and now Hummingbird and Google algorithm has become pretty smart in guessing who is creating links for links sake and who is getting linked by other webmasters because they have great contents. First and foremost create good content. Write it primarily for your visitors and not for Google then add keywords, LSI cousins and long-tail keywords judiciously to tell search engines what you are about. Then let people in your industry know about your pages as links from related websites count for a lot.
Check out the YouTube videos by Matt Cutts. You can't beat information coming directly from Google. A lot of information around the web and on this forum is out of date, unreliable and wrong.
Good point Mokah, one has to listen to what Google has to say on link-building and balance it with what experts in different SEO forums are saying. Google stance is on one extreme, it wants us to do no link building, just build compelling enough content to attract links. The black hat SEOers are on the other extreme it is all about creating Trojan horses to ballast through Google defenses.
You can check in the business and marketing section under search engines there is keywords section. Just have a look at and you will surely find useful things. You also can make a research by typing in your search engine for keywords and you will have to read to learn.