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.
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?
Yes and no. Yes, Google likes links. The more indeed the merrier. But Google is a little bit more clever than this. Setting up 10 000 pages with nothing else than links back to your website will most likely not get you anywhere with Google.
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?
Google will still rank the old lady’s website first. Why? Because the one backlink she has is from a highly regarded source. A source that gets thousands of visitors every day and which has numerous other top quality websites linking to it. Not to mention that the link pages you bought have no content except for the links and is therefore totally irrelevant to Google as far as your website’s ranking in search results is concerned.
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.
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.
