Everything about your backlinks strategy will come down to the quality of the websites that your backlinks feature on. If an inbound link comes from a website that has content relevant to your website, then they are considered of higher quality than those that are either not related or merely vaguely related. The more relevant those sites are, the higher the quality ranking and the greater priority search engines classify it as.
There are many ways that you can check that the site is relevant to yours. I like to use Majestic SEO.
This site will show you what the linking site is like as in Trust, if they are relevant and if they are a healthy site. It will also show you whom that site is linking to. If they are linking with poor sites, then it is likely that the poor trust will flow through.
A good idea is to start blogging and do some research on how to write a blog and get the reader’s attention. I have mentioned a few times in my own blog posts, books and public speaking that Google is a Librarian, it is that simple. If you use the search function and are looking for a book or piece of content on World War Two, they will pass you the book that has the best content, and the most amount of people have said ‘that’s a good book!’.
Now if 10 World War Two Experts told the librarian that your competitor’s book was the most valuable, and 100 Plumbers said that your book was the most valuable, who would the librarian side with?
Here it would be the experts, even though they have fewer votes, they are more relevant to the situation. Google works in the same way, so make sure the links that you get to the site are of value, trust, and relevance,
Taking Shortcuts With Backlinks – A Warning
Your backlinks need to be built up over a period. Stuffing your content with links and expecting other sites to do the same is the fastest way to gain a negative quality score on Google, and that will drastically reduce your SEO.
Far too many quick-fix website managers have taken the step of using unorthodox methods such as hidden links or even randomly generated pages that exist solely to provide linking possibilities. This is known as link farming and should be avoided at all costs. Search engines now recognise this tactic and will penalise your website as a result.
This is also known as ‘Black Hat’ SEO Marketing. Stay away at all costs. You will finally get a Google Penalty which means that the search engine will completely wipe you from the rankings if you are found to be doing this.
Reciprocal Linking
You do need to be careful with reciprocal backlinks because they will always need to keep the ‘relevance’ factor in mind, but they can be very useful. Reciprocal linking is when you include a link to another webpage on your site, in return for a backlink on their content pages that leads to yours.
This is very basic and is a major area of interest when it comes to search engines. However, it’s essential that your backlinks do not lead to a website with a bad quality rating and that any website that includes links to your site is also one with a positive rating.
Never choose a reciprocal arrangement with a website that makes too much use of outbound links, and always choose your linking partners based on their content quality as well. This will mean looking in-depth at their site and ensuring that its quality is as good (if not better) as your own.
A Word of Warning For Backlinks
If you manage some different websites, the temptation will be to simply backlink from one to the other in a perpetual loop. This is the fastest way to get punished by Google. Your IP address alone could be the way that search engines recognise this tactic, and they will lower your result page rankings accordingly.