Backlinks are a fundamental part of SEO but webmasters debate all the time whether it’s worth paying for links or whether organically generated links are the way forward and will give a higher return on investment.

Backlinks or inbound links as they are also known are the links found on websites that link back to your own website. The wrong assumption to have is that the more links there are linking back to your website the more value is attributed to your website. In SEO terms it is about link quality and not link quantity.

Domain authority

Before any backlinks are acquired it is important to thoroughly analyse your market and see which sites your own website will benefit from. There are several ways to analyse the authority a certain website has with page rank being the obvious, the higher the page rank, the more importance Google views the website as having. Age of the domain is another good indicator, as the longer a website has been around, the more value Google gives it.

Relevance is a final measure of how important a website is deemed to be as the more relevant content there is specific to a certain market the more importance that website has.

Once that you know what websites may benefit your own site it’s time to start creating backlinks. This process can be undertaken in several ways, as already mentioned it is not particularly worthwhile paying for links as the links that you will end up with will have very little impact on your website due to the poor page rank or low value of the page that is being linked to yours.

Link Trading

A way of getting good quality links is by trading links with the website you want to link to. This method allows you to place a backlink for your site on your partner’s website and vice versa which is mutually beneficial to both parties involved. This method of gaining backlinks allows you to potentially gain a high value backlink which is specific to the market you’re in.

Submitting to social bookmarking sites

You only need to scan the WebPages of Delicious, Digg or Reddit to realise the popularity of such websites. There is a reason why they are so popular and that reason lies with the fact that by submitting to such websites you gain the advantage of having a high value back link from a site that receives high volumes of traffic and could potentially drive some of that traffic towards your website. Content is the main ingredient here though as in order to guarantee a click through to your site, the content has to be fresh, unique and informative to the end users requirements.

Article Writing

If you are going to use this method of link building then do so with care. Increasingly companies are coming under fire for poor link building techniques with article writing being one of the more common causes. If you are going to write articles make sure they are relevant and offer some form of help or assistance and are not only there to be used as link bait. Furthermore make sure the article sites you are submitting to have a fairly high page rank and attract a notable amount of traffic.

Press releases

Press releases are a great way of generating backlinks and somewhat more of a discrete way of doing so. Depending on what market you’re involved in, press releases can be quite challenging to write if there is no actual news to shout about. Therefore it is best to wait until you have something worth spreading and when you do have some news, make sure what you write is as informative and as creative as possible. Generally backlinks can be placed within the main press release but if your content lacks the right words or terminology to link back to your site then adding an ‘about’ section at the end of your release can rectify this.

No follow

Finally and possibly the most important part – when creating links make sure that most of them if not all of them have a follow attribute assigned to them which means that Google places a value onto the link and it counts as a page vote. With a no follow attribute, the value that link holds is not counted and so the value of the link does not count towards the page rank.

Author Bio: Latitude is one of the largest and longest-established digital marketing agencies in the UK, with expertise in SEO, PPC, display advertising, social media, cialis cheap conversion analytics and affiliate marketing. Original article is Brand Viagra here.

Category: Internet Marketing/Link Popularity
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