How to Get One-Way-Backlinks

How do you get quality one-way backlinks to your website, hub or blog? One thing is for sure. If you are hoping to rank in the search engines, you will need to find them somehow.

Whether it is trying to build backlinks to support your hubs, support your website or support the blog, once writers figure out that simply writing good content is not enough, they start asking questions like how can I rank for this particular keyword or that keyword in the search engines?

The answer is what SEO professionals call off-page optimization. It is better known as building quality one-way backlinks to your site.  And in order to move up in the ranks, you need to play that game.

Before I go into some of the strategies to building links, I think it is important for someone looking to building backlinks to understand that there is a difference between certain backlink strategies and why some are better than others.

The internet (for search engines at least) is nothing more than a large network of sites connecting to each other. The search engines are able to recognize and determine relevancy of a page based on where a link is coming from and what the anchor text of the link says about the linked page.

There is no best way to build backlinks, only strategies and depending on what you are capable of and your understanding of SEO, your ability to build the right links to your page is every so important.

The more links you have pointing to a page, the more it means that your page is being "cited". Think of the search engines like high school. The most popular pages are going to be the ones that are cited in other websites and therefore will likely command a more prominent position in the search engines.

But it goes a little deeper than that....

Popular hangs with and will typically cite others that are popular. In graph theory, this is known as clustering. Let's say that you have a page on marketing strategies. Conventional wisdom will tell you that most likely the leaders in the niche will not only have more citations throughout the internet, it is very likely that they know each other and cite each other. Because of this, google will pass more weight when these websites link out because of their inherent authority....

A little further down the rabbit hole....

And the biggest kicker is that the anchor text is undoubtedly the single most important text in terms of improving your chances of ranking.....

For instance, many people will use comment marketing as a way to improve their visibility immediately (for social traffic) and also improve their rankings. They are under the thought process that a link is a link is a link.

In reality, if you are comment marketing and using your name as the anchor text, then you are actually helping your site rank for your name and likely not the keyword you are hoping for.

Deeper and deeper you go....

Another issue that is highly debated is that back links coming from similar websites will hold more weight and authority than links coming from websites that aren't similar...

For instance,

A website based around Audi repair will rank better if their links are coming from car sites than if the links are coming from pet sites.

The reason for this is that for google, it is all about user experience. And chances are that someone looking at that pet site wouldn't be able to make sense of why there is a website for car repair. However a car repair website that links out to audi repair....now that makes sense....

So, now you know what type of backlink you need. And chances are you aren't trying to rank for a highly competitive keyword but have gotten wise and figured out that long tail keywords are where it's at....

And if you didn't know already, you now know that when you are shooting for one way back links, you want the back links to be anchored with your keyword....

And finally, you want to focus primarily on getting back links from websites that are similar to your page or theme.....

Sorry, but the primer had to happen to get people thinking like an SEO.  So knowing now what you know, what kind of backlink strategy would you go for?  

There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to back link getting-

1. Lots of low-quality links
2. A few high quality links

• Guest posting-  There is simply nothing more powerful as far as link acquisition goes (aside from outright purchasing backlinks) than being a guest writer on a website in your market.  I have told people over and over that boosting a guest post with links will not only help the webmaster of the website but it will make your back link even more powerful.
• Web2.0 properties- Folr long tail keywords, you can actually build a very powerful backlink network off of web2.0 properties like hubpages, squidoo, or infobarrel.  Building these types of properties will age well overtime, may rank right out of the box for other keywords thus improving your visibility for other terms and could become a powerful link with age and a little work.

My final thought on how to get one back links is that you need to understand that link building takes time and in most cases, you can't expect more than a slight boost from the search engine immediately.

The most common sense strategy for building backlinks is rather than running all over the net getting low quality backlinks, instead focusing on boosting those high quality backlinks with backlinks.

In other words, if you are guest posting, the better strategy is to boost the guest post with links which will make your backlink not only more authoritative but stronger.  Build enough of these types of backlinks and you could rank for anything.

Building backlinks takes time and patience

One of the bigger frustrations for marketers and people who are trying to get their page ranked is that there is an element of blind faith involved.  You have to keep building even when it looks like the page will never get ranked.

I have had hubpages that have taken months to move from page 2 to page 1.  It is just part of the business.....anyway, I need to get back to building backlinks for my pages....until next time...