How to Build Back Links to Your Web Site
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Google revolutionized the search engine industry by counting links to web sites as “votes” for that site. This allowed it to rank sites based on their relevance to particular key words. Relevance of results remains high on the list of qualities that searchers expect, and even though the algorithms have increased in complexity, back links continue to play an important role in your web site’s position in the SERPs.
But how do you build those all-important back links? The search engines watch for black hat SEO practices and have even developed a number of ways to spot them, so using link farms and paying for links can end up costing you far more than you stand to gain. Since you might as well not exist for many searchers if you don’t make it into the first 30 results for your keyword, this is a serious matter; many people have staked their livelihoods on web sites that receive most of their traffic from the search engines.
Okay, so you can’t use black hat techniques. Reciprocal linking may also be questionable if the link is from a site whose content is not relevant to what your site is all about. Besides, you have to make sure the site keeps the link. So what does that leave?
It leaves quite a lot actually. Google and the other search engines want to see natural links to sites to show them (and those who use them) content that is truly relevant to the searched-for keywords. The simple way to do this is by having relevant content – more specifically, you should have content on your site to which people WANT to link. These natural links mean far more to the search engines and your potential visitors than any links you could garner using black hat techniques.
This kind of relevant, interesting, useful, and noteworthy content even has a name: “linkbait.” You can think of it as a natural consequence of the old saw that content is king online. But what kind of content will give you back links? Everyone says “high quality content,” but that’s not very specific. While it varies from industry to industry, in this article I’m going to go over some tips for creating linkbait that can be adapted to almost any field. Please keep in mind that there are numerous ideas, far more than I have the space to discuss in this article. Some might even merit articles in their own right. If there is interest, I may cover more techniques in a future article.
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