So How Do I Approach Backlinking?

I think of getting back links as an investment. Each one you get adds a little bit more value to your site – that’s my motivation for going and finding them. Yes, link building can be extremely boring and time consuming, but every link you get can be an incremental push towards getting higher Search Engine rankings.

Another motivation I have is to have a goal. Look at your competitors links and have a number in your head of what you want to aim for in say a week, a month, 2 months, etc. A good tool that I use is Yahoo’s site explorer. It allows me to analyse your own and your competitors links (Note: You need to register for a Yahoo account before you use it).

I’ve read countless articles about which back links are ‘relevant’ and which you should be avoiding and everyone has something slightly different to say. I’m going to give my opinion here that is based on my experience. There’s no exact rules so you can use my techniques in paralell with some of your backlinking techniques.

So what exactly should you look for when building links:

• A link from a page that is relevant to yours is worth WAY MORE than a link that isn’t relevant. For example, if you have a dieting site your backlinks should be coming from other dieting sites.
• Page Rank is a factor when getting links. But remember this, Page rank is only good if your backlinks are coming from relevant sites within relevant content.
• In-content links with targeted anchor text are taken in high regard compared to links in footers etc.
• Reciprocal links are almost worthless
• Paid links are worthless. Several Fortune 500 companies have been “red flagged” in Google and lost all of their rankings for buying irrelevant backlinks.
• Nofollow links are NOT worthless (CONTROVERSIAL)

I know, I know – that last one may be a bit controversial but it’s what I believe. I look at it this way; Google wants to see a steady influx of natural, varied links. KEY: Natural and Varied.

To me that means that hardly any links are worthless (apart from the afore mentioned), I want to see a mixture of links pointing to my site. Low page rank, high page rank, do-follow, no-follow, mostly relevant, some not. Mix it up! If Google saw that you had only links from PR8 websites or only links from article directories it would look unnatural right? So that’s the key for me – Natural and Varied.

You should also consider the number of backlinks that you are getting to your site. If you have too many, it can also make your incoming links look suspicious to Google and thus cause them to red flag your site and in some cases delist. The key here is slow and steady at first. Remember - natural!