Tuesday, January 3, 2012

What to Do and Not Do When Creating Backlinks


Backlinks are an essential and important part of building your SEO plan. Without them, it becomes difficult to build your site's ranking in the search engines. Placing them correctly can be a bit tricky. Understanding what they are and how they work is actually easy and knowing their importance is critical to any successful SEO plan.

So what exactly is a backlink? A backlink is exactly what it sounds like. It is a link to your website from another site. Not all backlinks are the same though and search engines will take a backlink from a high traffic site that has similar information to yours more seriously than from a site that receives little to no traffic or has nothing to do with what your site is all about. It's really not the number of backlinks that your site has as much as the quality that counts toward your site's ranking. Some people have gotten into a bad habit of building thousands of backlinks on low traffic and low PR ranking sites which can be a huge mistake in the long run.

The search engines recognize this as backlink spamming and will disregard those links or even count them against you. There's a balance that must be achieved and maintained at all times when building your backlinks. The perfect site as a candidate for a backlink to yours is a site that has similar subject matter and quite a bit of traffic. Since the search engines have tightened their ranking structure when it comes to backlinks because of link farms and other sneaky tactics, paying attention to where your links are going is more important now than ever. You want to stay away from link farms and sites that have nothing to do with the subject matter of your own. It is even possible to have your site banned from the search engines by using link farms and other questionable methods of backlink building.

What is the best way to build a site's backlinks? Slowly and over time is the short answer to that question. The longer version is a little more complicated. Remember both and you'll do just fine. If your site is about cooking you will want to link to similar sites and skip over the opportunity to link to a site that is about automotive repair. That backlink will not help you with your ranking. However a link to a site about vintage recipes more than likely will. That would be a valuable backlink. If it is a site that receives quite a bit of traffic then that is even better. Stay away from link farms which are sites that are full of nothing but backlinks to multiple and random sites around the web.

These links are usually ignored by the search engines and are a waste of time and sometimes even money. Occasionally they can even result in your site being banned which is the worst thing that can happen. Do not link all of your websites together unless they are relevant to each other. The search engines know the ISP of each website and are suspicious of multiple ISP sites linking to each other. If they have similar subject matter then that is one thing and keep the links to a minimum. Just don't plaster them all over each site's pages.

It's a big no no that can cause those links to be disregarded. Once you understand backlinks and how they work, the rest just takes time but is fairly easy to accomplish. Build them slowly and wisely and in the end your site will be the shining star that you are looking for and have the ranking that you want to achieve. Always remember that slow and steady really does win the race and you'll do fine with your backlinking campaign.




To search other high-value added research articles written by Oliver Gu, please visit Oliver's website at Internet Training | Marketing Training or simply click here Business Marketing | Business Training!




No comments:

Post a Comment