Building quality backlinks

If you want to perform well in search engines then you need to focus some of your time and energy into building quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Search engines determine the popularity of your website based on the number of quality links from other websites to your own. While the number of quality backlinks is not the only factor in determining your ranking within search engines the more quality backlinks you have the more likely you will rank better within search engines.

So what is a quality backlink?

A quality backlink is a link from a trusted website relevant to your industry. A trusted website is a website that ranks well within search engines and doesn’t participate in any practices that search engines consider to be unethical. Ideally backlinks should contain keywords relevant to your industry or your specific product or service offering and your website content should be optimised to use those keywords throughout. But the big thing to keep in mind when building backlinks is the relevance of the websites that will link to your website to your industry and your products and/or services. The more relevant the website containing the backlink happens to be the better.

Here’s a quick list of potentially relevant businesses that may be willing to provide you with a link from their website to your website:

• Suppliers
• Customers
• Strategic Partners
• Industry Associations

You can find out who’s linking to your website and the websites of your competitors by searching for backlinks using a special link command in Google. Enter 'link:website_domain_name' into Google and Google will return a list of web pages that it considers are relevant as links to the domain name you enter.

For example to view all of the links Google considers relevant to the jackmarlow.com website I would search for ‘link:jackmarlow.com’ within Google. Using this technique you can quickly identify other websites, relevant to your industry, currently linking to your competitors’ websites. The companies behind those websites may be happy to include similar links to your website which will help boost your performance in search engines.

Natural Links

The holy grail of link building is developing content that other people in your industry or related industries want to reference. These natural links are pure gold as they accumulate without any further effort on your part. This is one of the main reasons why commercial blogs have become so popular; blog content is usually of high value and interest to others in your industry or others wanting to know more about your industry. As such, a well written blog can generate a large number of backlinks and seriously improve your website’s position in search engines.

Bad Neighbourhoods

Search engines are on the lookout for bad neighbourhoods; websites that include links that have been added for a single purpose; to attempt to trick search engines into ranking pages higher within search results. Links from bad neighbourhoods can influence the level of trust search engines assign to your website and can lead to a negative impact on your overall ranking. It’s a good idea to avoid any form of paid link exchange program, link exchanges are considered by search engines to be bad neighbourhoods.

If you think about what search engines are trying to achieve it’s pretty easy to see why they don’t like certain practices. The purpose of a search engine is to provide users with the most relevant content available on the web based on the specific words the user enters into the search engine. The more relevant the results the better the user experience and the more likely that the user will continue to use the search engine. Any scheme that attempts to skew search results and lead to search engines not serving up the most relevant content to users represents a threat to search engines, which is why they penalise websites that participate in these schemes.

Conclusion

Building backlinks is one of the best methods available for improving your position within search engines and thereby generating more visitors to your website. The key to successful backlinking is building backlinks from trusted relevant sources and avoiding dubious link exchange schemes and link farms. It's an exercise in relationship building with serious potential to propel your online presence to the next level, so get out there and start building backlinks now.

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