SEO - Building Backlinks the Right Way

Backlinks are essentially the numbers that tell everyone that your website is up and running. They're the stars of the search engine. Google loves them for their simplicity: all you need to do is post a single link, click on a button, and watch the traffic flood in! What's even more fascinating is that backlinks are affected by a myriad of factors, some of which we're only barely aware of. In this article, we'll go over the least important ones and explain how they factor into your backlinking strategy.

Backlinks Most importantly, Backlinks tell people that your website exists! The most beneficial to SEO, however, are back links that point to your actual website and add a subtle link placed inside relevant, quality content. Commonly, editorial backlinks are generated when your content is cited or being talked about, when an industry representative is interviewed or quoted, or when your website is listed in a backlink roundup... a list that contains thousands of other websites that are all trying to gain backlinks to yours. The more authoritative the source, the more valuable the backlink is. The least important backlinks in this instance are those that simply direct readers to another website.

Links that lead to a single page are considered to be the most important backlinks. These are the ones that most SEO experts spend time working on. These backlinks act like votes for your website, which is why they're so important. A higher number of votes for your website translate into more traffic, more page views, and ultimately, a higher ranking on the search engines. As such, many search engine optimization specialists will work on getting backlinks from high PageRank websites.

Some website owners may attempt to game the system by linking to themselves or their own sites in an effort to get a "free" backlink and thus keep their rankings low. However, this isn't really fair. If the page linking to you has low domain authority, it's unlikely that your link will be accepted. In fact, some search engines such as Google can already check to see if the page linking back to you is authoritative. By indirectly voting for your rankings through this type of linking, you are in essence cheating yourself out of the benefit of good rankings and potentially losing your competitive edge.

The main way that SEO works to boost rankings is through the process of building internal links that contribute value. By analyzing how internal and external links affect rankings, search engines determine how to best provide the best overall experience for their users. Link building practices such as DMOZ (Do Follow Me) and follow links are used in this process.

The fact is, though, that there is more to backlinking than just the obvious. Internal and external backlinks aren't always the best method for improving search engine rankings, because they don't always follow the natural links created within a site's pages. This means that the quality of backlinks can vary depending on how a search engine determines the value of a website. As such, backlinks should never be blindly counted as votes in the race to get your website to the top of the rankings.