What Is A Good Backlink Strategy

What is a backlink strategy? This is simply a description of the strategy a website owner follows to get other websites to link back to his website. The popular misconception is that as far as this goes the more the better. 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. That the more incoming links you have to your website, the higher it will be ranked in search results. This was after all how Google started off - the researchers developed a ground breaking way to rank search results in terms of backlinks, right?

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. If that were true anyone could quickly set up ten thousand pages with links back to his own website and get listed in the number one spot for whatever he wants.

The truth is that Google has a way to decide which links will count heavily towards a site’s ranking in search results and which links can basically be discarded. If you think about it, you will soon realize it makes a lot of sense.

How does Google do this? The answer once again makes a lot of sense. 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? Why?

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.

How do you get backlinks from such important, relevant websites though? If your website content is really of a high standard, you could contact well know websites in that category and ask them for backlinks. This is hard work, but can be very effective.

Another option is to write articles about the subject and submit them to high quality article directories using what is called, article marketing. They will allow you to put a link in the article back to your website. If your articles are really good they will also be syndicated - picked up by other websites, which in turn will have backlinks to your site. This is a much more logical and effective backlink strategy than buying worthless links.

This entry was posted on 03/12/2009 at 09:51 pm and is filed under Article Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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