Search Engine Optimization practitioners can agree on very few things. Usually, if you ask 100 SEO’ers a question, you’re very likely to get at least 50 different responses, if not 100 different responses. Every SEOer has an opinion and will gladly share with you their empirical and irrefutable evidence that backs up their claim.
I believe that there’s only 1 thing that most search engine optimizers can agree on. That one thing is that you need to have back links, also called inbound links, to your site if you want the search engines to find your site.
A back link, is a link that points to your website from another website.
Back links can be naked, for example:
or they can use anchored keyword rich text like this:
There is a lot of discussion about whether the links need to come from relevant sites or not. What I mean by that is this:
Suppose you have a site about growing your own vegetable garden. Is it more valuable to have a link from the gardening section of a department store website, a link from another gardener, a generic link from a university website, a link from a governement site or a link from a totally unrelated site? My answer is: it doesn’t matter where the link comes from.
There’s lots of talk about bad neighborhoods, about spammy links and so on. In my opinion, most of those discussions are just splitting hairs on nuances. I believe, that a link, is a link, is a link. You cannot stop someone from putting a link to your website, the search engines know this. I do not believe that there is much weight given to the origin of the inbound link, but there is much attention given to the quality of the link. More on quality of links later.
Bottom line: Everyone can agree that you need backlinks to your sites and most everyone agrees that the best kind of link is an anchored, keyword rich link.
Now, how do you get back links?
Here are 2 ways:
1. Do it by hand. Meaning, go out and find sites that you can add links to and start adding links to your site. Lots of sites allow you to add links to your websites in exchange for something. Sites like ezinearticles.com, associatedcontent.com, squidoo.com and others allow you to add links pointing back to your site in exchange for content. This method is very time consuming, it can be tedious and can also be labor intensive.
2. Use software to do it for you. There is a type of specialized software that goes out and finds sites that allow automatic posting of links and do all of the link building for you. Here are 2 not spammy software programs that will handle creating links for you:
a.) 3 Way Links: This is a membership site. It works on the premise that it finds 3 sites to exchange links in such a fashion that no 2 sites point back to each other. You do need to know a little bit about your website’s architecture in order to join it, but it’s pretty straight forward.
b.) 30 minute backlinks: What I like about this program, is that you build the links while creating software. I’m not a programmer, but in the course you’ll learn how to create little software programs just by filling in the blanks with some variables. My favorite, out of all the programs I created, was the screen saver.
Which is best?
It’s up to you to decide. Both methods work really well, on their own, but probably a combination of manual and software will yield the best results over time. The real secret sauce is that you need to know your target keywords. If you don’t know what keywords to target, no amount of backlinks will do you any good.
The keywords are the key element.
I’ll share 2 other products with you, in a different post that specifically deal with keywords and how to pick them.