Search Engine Optimization: Relevant Backlinks
It’s not secret that a big part of your SEO strategy should be backlink focused. Generating hundreds (if not thousands) of relevant, targeted backlinks will do wonders for your sites search engine rankings. The concept of SEO is one that has mystified countless webmasters- how to gain good search engine rankings, develop traffic, and then monetize that traffic is the riddle in its entirety, isn’t it?
Of course, certain offline elements can help bring traffic to your website. Telling your friends and family about your new website may bring 5 or 10 unique hits a day for a little while, but that traffic source is limited and not very effective. The traffic that you’re looking for is the millions of people surfing the internet worldwide. SEO is not a horned monster that must be tamed, but rather a delicate operation and integration of essential elements that come together to form the final outcome.
Backlinks are good from an SEO point of view for a variety of reasons:
- Drive traffic to your site - Backlinks may drive additional traffic to your website through the actual links themselves. This is an added bonus, as the links are more for SEO purposes than for traffic generation, but who’s going to complain?
- Gain you a position on prominent websites - Having an industry important backlink from a website that is well respected in your niche is gold. That’s like having GM mention your car dealership as the place to buy a car from- instant credibility.
- Gains you credibility with the top-tier search engines - Google, Yahoo, and MSN all give targeted backlinks credibility and weight when they are determining how to rank your website. The anchor text of that link (what the user reads the link as) is arguably the most important element of your SEO strategy for a particular keyword.
The core of your SEO strategy should focus on developing targeted backlinks from related websites to your niche. If your website is about cars you’ll want to generate as many backlinks as possible for domains that are related to cars. Having thousands of incoming links from websites about Halloween or music isn’t targeted at all, and the top-tier search engines many penalize your website for “link spamming”.
So, while it is important for you to generate targeted and category relevant backlinks, you should only do so on websites and through networks that are related in the eyes of the search enginess
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