Steps Toward An Efficient Strategy For Backlinking

When it comes to creating a backlink strategy, there is a popular myth out there – a pervasive urban legend. That legend is that “it’s all numbers game”. There are countless SEO ‘experts’ running around charging customers huge sums of money to get thousands of links back to their websites.

These guys argue that Google loves external links to a website. The more backlinks it finds, the higher it will regard that website and the more often it will appear on top of search results.

Right and wrong. Google is not quite that stupid to only take a look at the number of incoming links to a website to decide whether it will be ranked on the first page of search results or the last. Google does not have such a simplistic view. It does not rate all links as equal. Otherwise it would have been quite easy to set up thousands of pages with backlinks to your own website and thereby get to the top of Google search results very quickly.

The important issue for Google is not quantity but quality. They have never published the exact algorithm they use to rank the listing of web pages, but it’s fairly certain that they don’t simply look at the number of incoming links to a site, but to the quality of those links as well.

But what is a quality backlink then? Why would one link be given a higher value than another link? The answer is simple: relevance. It’s not really such a difficult concept to explain. Suppose you had a website about dogs. Everything about dogs, what they like, what they don’t like, what to feed them and when. So you get the local vet to link to your site from his, and you link back to him. Down the road is another guy also with a website about dogs. His articles about dogs are so good that he gets the American Dog Owner’s Association to link back to his website. Which website do you think Google would list first in search results?

Should you become clever now and get the local vet, as well as ten small shops to link to you and you also buy 5 000 links on the Internet, Google should surely wake up and rank you first, shouldn’t they?

What do you think will happen? The correct answer is: nothing. Google will still rank the other guy on top, because the one link to his website is a) from an authoritative website that may have thousands of other websites linking to them and b) the content of his website is related to the content on that other website.

To get quality backlinks to your site is not easy. That is why so many people still fall for the “10 000 quality links” trick. You might have to write to 50 website owners and ask them to look at your website content to get one good backlink in the end. Should it be from a authoritative website that one link might make a big difference though.

Writing articles for top quality article directories, a strategy known as article marketing, will also get you some worthwhile backlinks, since they allow you to link back to your site from the article. And if your articles are as good as you think, they will eventually be syndicated – other websites will publish them as well and also link to your site. As a backlink strategy this will be much more effective than buying low-quality links.