Backlinks are 95% of the whole SEO process. This is what gets your website ranked for your targeted keywords. A Backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor link which points back to your website. When Google crawls a website they will see your backlink for your keyword and improve your rankings for that keyword.

These backlinks cannot just be put in any website. Google identifies each website into categories, eg, finance, marketing, beauty etc, by the amount of unique relevant content on each site. The more unique content, the higher the Google PR is for the website. These are the sites you need to create your backlinks from. If you place a backlink on a website that is relevant to yours and is full of unique, relevant content, the power of this backlink will be higher. To make this backlink even more powerful surround your backlink with quality unique, relevant text about your keyword, around 200 words would be ideal. Google will add more power to this backlink for your Local SEO if it is surrounded by relevant, unique content, rather than just a backlink on its own.

Creating links from link directories, article directories, blog comments, social bookmarking etc is really out of date and unfortunately there are many SEO companies still using this technique. This types of websites are only created for the sole purpose of created links and contain no theme or relevant content so Google pays no attention from this sites meaning they will pay no attention to your backlink. Also the people that have created these sites probably have many, many more of these link directory sites that they have created which all will share the same IP address and hosting package which will lead to link farming. Please stay away from linking to these sites or any Local SEO company that uses these websites to create your links.

The only real way to create backlinks that will improve your rankings is from real, relevant websites that contain high quality content.