Beauty and the Backlink

Posted on by citycliq

It takes a lot to get noticed on the web.  Your site could be the prettiest, the wittiest, or the coolest ever created, but with over 230 million others out there, it’s easier than ever to get lost in the clutter. One thing that can put a nice gust of wind in your sails and blow you past your competition is an armada of quality backlinks.

What the heck is a backlink?
A backlink is simply an inbound link that brings someone from a website to your website.  The number and quality of these links is a large contributing factor as to where you will show up in search engines such as Google.  In Google’s mind, if a lot of people want to link to your site, then your site must be pretty darn good.  As a reward for making a good website that other good websites want to link to, Google will place you higher up in search engine results and people will have a much better chance of finding you over the other 230 million websites currently infesting the inter-webs.

Quality LinksQuality Links

More is not always better…
Notice that one of the key words that I used above was QUALITY.  Google recognizes quality backlinks from reputable sources.  For example, a link that comes from Cnet.com would weigh much heavier on your page ranking than a link coming from Joe Blow’s Crazy Cat page that was created last month.  With that being said, stay as far away from Link Farms as you can.  These are basically services that offer you tons of backlinks, except the links are from sources that are about as far away from quality as you can get.  The usual pitch is, “We can get you thousands of links…” but what they don’t tell you is that those links will be from pages similar to Joe Blow’s Crazy Cat page.

Quality Backlink Site Content

Link farms were big in the late 90s, but as Google started its conquest for Internet (and possibly world) domination, link farms quickly started gaining a reputation as “black-hat” style SEO practice (which means search engines don’t like it).  By participating in these types of activities, your ranking in search engines will usually be compromised and your site may even be blacklisted itself if you do things like link-exchanging with known malicious or seedy sites.
Rule of thumb, the internet is not Mesopotamia, it’s not a fertile delta, therefore anything with Farm and the Internet in the same sentence should be avoided, and that includes Farmville (sorry, Facebook fans).

Quality BacklinksImage from Tech It Easy

So how do I get QUALITY backlinks?
Well, it’s not easy.  People need to find your content relevant enough to want to link to it and, most importantly, you have to get the word out that your content even exists.  One of the best ways to do that is to get involved in your online community.  Interact with people via Twitter, Facebook and other blogs that are relevant to your business.  Get involved in discussions on other popular sites and create a profile on there, but make your profile name a clickable link back to your site.  That way, when you comment with relevant information that moves the discussion forward in said blog or site, you help build your site’s “brand” and become a potentially quotable source.

Be careful not to spam the comment sections, though, as that will most likely turn off your potential new friends before they even get a chance to know you.  Interact with other people professionally, act like a real person instead of a robot, and other commenters and publishers will be much more inclined to check out and possibly link to your site.

There’s no question that the benefits of getting good, quality backlinks greatly outweigh the labor and sweat it takes to get them. Feel free to comment with your backlink experiences (good & bad, we don’t discriminate) and share some other strategies that may have worked for you and your business.

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