What is a back link?
Simply put a back link is a link from one web page to another.
Off-site SEO is just as important as on-site SEO, a solid back linking programme has to be apart of your overall marketing budget, otherwise you're not leveraging the potential traffic through better search engine results.
Off-site SEO is just as important as on-site SEO, a solid back linking programme has to be apart of your overall marketing budget, otherwise you're not leveraging the potential traffic through better search engine results.
Search engines consider that if one web page has a link on it to a page on a different website that the page with the link must like or think that the page it’s linking to has some good information, it’s basically a vote of confidence. The search engines namely Google work on the basis that if you have lots of links to your website then you must be important. But there’s a lot more to back links than that. Each back link is a positive vote, however each link also carries a value, that value is calculated on the page with the link, the calculation takes into account the pages page rank and how many external links that page has, there’s more factors taken into account but for explanation purposes. This value is commonly known as “link juice” and it’s this that all SEO’s and SEM’s chase.
Ok so why do I need back links and their link juice?
These are part of the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the more valuable a page and website appear to the search engines the higher they will be placed in searches, obviously having higher placing in searches results in more traffic to the website, more traffic results in more sales or leads or whatever services the website offers. Another piece of the puzzle is a website also has to have good content and use good practices for the keywords that it wants to be found on. Good keywords also have to be researched as there is no use chasing a keyword to be ranked number one when no one searches for that word.
So, now how to I get good valued back links?
Because search engines expect that back links are created manually i.e. when a website owner likes another page or website so puts a link on their website to yours, that this process is gradual commonly known as organic, this means that the back links to your website have to grow in a steady manner. If back links to your website grow too fast the search engines will penalize it as it’s obvious the links are not organic, at least they will be ignored, rendering them useless, if the website finds that it was your doing from using bad linking practices they will take harsher action against your website which can kill any search engine traffic to your website. Back links can come from many different sources, web directories, blog posts, business directories, chambers of commerce, articles, press releases and social media, using a combination of all forms of these is the best practice in making your website more important to the search engines.
That’s a lot of ways of getting back links so it should be really easy?
Yes and No. Yes it’s easy to get a back link, but it’s hard to get a good quality back link, the good quality back links take time and research. One of the best forms of back linking is article publishing. Publishing articles on high page ranked websites using good keywords and a link to your website can have great benefits which can come in different forms, form one traffic, form two link juice. Publishing articles you have to abide by the rules of the publishing website you want to put your article onto, the good publishing websites are very strict on what content they publish but for good reason, they are much more likely to rank higher on a keyword than your website for difficult to get keywords, by having an article on a website like that and a link to yours you eventually get both traffic and link juice. Building back links also has to look natural looking, meaning the back links to your website should grow organically, which also means slowly.
Back linking has to look organic, any SEO company telling you they will get you hundreds or more backlinks in a month will have you waste your money as they would not considered organic by the likes of Google
Back linking has to look organic, any SEO company telling you they will get you hundreds or more backlinks in a month will have you waste your money as they would not considered organic by the likes of Google
Writing Articles is one of many different techniques.
Choosing a topic for an article needs to be somewhat related to your business or service, but it does not and in most cases should not be directly about your business, to abide by the rules and requirements of the publishing website the articles need to be informative and interesting for people to read. Once the article is published it’s important to promote it through other article publishing and social media sources, promoting the article is required for the same reasons as promoting the website it links to, to get the article to be seen as important by the search engines which will give it a higher page rank and search engine result on difficult to attain keywords, with a high page rank the link value, link juice is passed to the website. Press releases and Promotions / competitions are not articles, so these should be about your business.
Summary.
The whole idea of off-site SEO is promotion of different elements for them to gain popularity and importance to drive traffic through different methods to your website. For business owners that want any kind results and traffic for their online presence their strategy has to include on-site and off-site search engine optimization.
