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Posts Tagged ‘external linking’

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. Many “SEO experts” have become rich from selling virtually worthless backlinks.

No doubt you have also heard that Google is crazy about links. 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 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.

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 expect will happen? The answer is simple: nothing. Google will still rank the website with the link from the American Dog Owner’s Association above yours. The reason: That one link is from a website visited by thousands of people every day and they have numerous other well-known websites linking to them. Furthermore the content on his website is relevant and in the same category as the content on the website linking to him.

Getting links back to your website from highly regarded websites is not easy though. If you know what you are talking about, one possible solution is to start writing articles and submit them to article directories. Mostly you won’t get paid for them, but you will be able to include a backlink to your website.

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.