Blog: Marketing and Social Media

How Google Views Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other sites that are directed to your site. Backlinks are widely regarded as one of the primary building blocks of SEO – important for high ranking by search engines. Google, for instance, gives more credit to sites that have a high number of relevant, high-quality backlinks because Google believes that is an indication of the site’s importance. As a Marketing strategy, backlinks are basic.

How do you get high quality, relevant backlinks?

IMPORTANT: Many of the promotional tactics below involve posting meaningful, keyword-rich content on the internet. This is the critical marketing strategy you MUST implement in order to drive interested traffic to your site – your ideal customer. This method is called ‘organic’, and is the backbone of search engine optimization.

Choose only high-ranking sites. (Page rank is Google’s way of assigning a relative importance indicator to a site, for the purpose of its search algorithm.) Post ONLY relevant material. Your content should ALWAYS include a link back to your site. If you use automated tools and receive irrelevant, low-ranking backlinks, search engines will actually penalize your site for it. There is NO shortcut method that is automatic, instant, or any other easy way to gain permanent, niche-targeted traffic that yields recurring buyers.

AVOID these link-building strategies:

They’re called ‘black hat’ techniques, and search engines will penalize you. Stay away from them:

• ‘Link farms’
• Inter-linking (exchanging links from sites with the same owner)
• Sites that ‘rank’ less than four
• Purchasing links
• Sites that engage in illegal activity

Concentrate on getting highly ranked, relevant, natural backlinks. Place your links only on sites with a page rank of at least four. Five + is better. To quickly determine if a site ranks well enough to warrant your time and your link, use this free Page Rank Checker tool: http://www.prchecker.info/

One important ratio to track is the ratio of inbound to outbound links. You want to have MORE links point to your site (inbound) than links on your site pointing elsewhere (outbound). Periodically check the number and source of backlinks (inbound) to your site by using this free tool: http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ Then count the links in your site. Calculate inbound/outbound. The answer should be greater than one. Example: 202 inbound / 37 outbound = 5.45 – Good!

BACKLINK TIP:

Webconf’s free tool offers you a natural way to find relevant sites that invite link requests. Enter your long tail keyword. The result is a list of websites that include the keyword and “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add website”, etc. You can check their page rank, contact the sites you like, and request to add your link. This takes time, but quality backlinks are essential to achieve recognition by search engines. As part of your marketing plan, try to add a few each day.  http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php

Have you found helpful tips for building high quality, relevant backlinks?

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

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