When you find out that backlinks are a major factor in your Google ranking, you might jump to spam your links all over blog comments and various untrustworthy sites. While this seems like the easiest and fastest solution, it’s also a very dangerous tactic that can actually harm your search engine rankings.
The keyword when it comes to backlinks: QUALITY. Before you even think about your backlink strategy, it’s important to understand Google’s mission.
“Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources.”
If your backlink strategy is positioned to go against this mission, your efforts will land you penalized.
Here are a few things to consider when creating a backlink strategy:
Website Organization: Is your website organized? You might think that this isn’t relevant to the topic, but in reality, your website organization is vital for a successful backlink strategy. Your backlinks are bringing your target audience to your site, and they should not be left confused. Make sure that your website is user friendly and easy to navigate.
Be Patient: It’s natural to create a valuable piece of content and want to instantly spread it across all of your platforms to begin gathering those backlinks. Here is some food for thought: if you gather too many backlinks too quickly, it can be viewed as spam and the search engine will penalize you. Create a plan of action that slowly spreads quality links. Slow and steady wins the race when in it comes to SEO.
Backlinks are important, but content is key: Create content that your visitors will find valuable. Moz’s SEO guru, Cyrus Shepard recommends that “90% of your effort should go into creating great content and 10% into link building.” in his popular article: “How to Rank”. You have a much better chance of acquiring backlinks if people are finding your content useful.
Target sites with a high relevancy to your topic. If you’ve written an excellent article about weight loss, but are targeting sites about business for your backlinks, you’ll most likely be wasting your time. It’s important to research websites to analyze their content and their trust factors before you ask for that link.
To sum it up, a “quality backlink” is a backlink that meet’s Google’s criteria and helps them to achieve their mission. It should not be associated with low-quality content or quickly spammed to sites that aren’t relevant or reliable. Contact Daruma Marketing for more SEO strategy ideas to enhance your positions.
