How Backlinks Can Make Or Break Your SEO Campaign

Google & The History of Backlinks

In the early days of SEO, throwing the kitchen sink at your website (in terms of backlinks) was more than enough to skyrocket your way to the top of the Google SERPs.

As Google re-defined & improved its algorithm, things began to get complicated for search marketers.

When the following updates rolled out – Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, Hummingbird, Payday Loans, among many others,  the whole SEO world was turned upside down at every step of the way.

Spam flags such as thin content, dupe content, low quality flags first took their toll on websites. Then Google began targeting link networks, anchor text profiles, and the quality & quantity of a particular website’s backlinks.

Over time, it became very clear to Search Engine Marketers that the quality of your site’s inbound links and the anchor text used were some of the determining factors of whether your site would prevail or perish in the search results.

Google began to prefer sites that had natural linking patterns, branded properties, quality links, correctly structured citations and the right amount of keyword usage and placement of the website’s brand, services, and locations in the page title, meta descriptions, permalink structure, headers & picture alt-text.

With the introduction of the Web 2.0, Google also started incorporating bookmarks, likes, shares, tweets, content syndication and other social signals as part of its algorithm.

When the semantic search update rolled out, Google shifted its eyes towards looking at synonyms and word associations. As such, having your primary keyword as 60% of your anchor text became wildly unnatural and many people’s rankings dropped. If you take a look at some of the websites atop the search engines’ backlink profiles – they’re very well-branded, natural and of high quality.

Looking at the screenshot above – the website http://ift.tt/1NQWyju ranks #1 for water damage repair franklin tn. However; despite having NO anchor text directly or indirectly targeting that keyword, they still continue to dominate the search results for virtually every water damage repair city keyword in the state of Tennessee.

Why? Because when the website is set-up correctly, then Google has a very good idea of what your website is about and what keywords you’re going after so your backlinks should be built with the premise of creating trust & authority rather than attempting to manipulate your way on-to the search results which can be a very easy penalty to walk into.

So the question then arises:

How Do We Build Quality-Branded Backlinks?

Well, isn’t that the million-dollar question.

Here’s some ways you can go about this.

1. Building branded social & web 2.0 properties.
   1. These are things like Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, G+ pages, Google My Business pages, WordPress blogs, Tumblr blogs, Blogger blogs, and so on and so forth.
   2. An added benefit – besides the branding aspect, of these properties is they high domain authority & trust that these sites carry is then transferred to your site as well. Which Google LOVES.
2. High quality citations
   1. Listing your website in local directories. National directories. Niche-related directories. Yelp, YellowPages, BetterBusinessBureau, etc…
3. Networking & Community Outreach
   1. Networking with people in your community can be a great way not only to earn links, but also recommendations and referrals.
4. Donations
   1. Some powerful sites have an option that for a simple donation you can easily get listed as a “donor” or “sponsor” and they allow you place a link on their page back to your site. Some of these links can be very powerful and do help, but some of them can be very spammy as well. Keep an eye out.

 

Anyways, this is all for today. I believe this quick lesson to be a powerful one as many people are very confused when it comes to building links to their websites and building authority & trust in the eyes of the big G.

 

Until next time,

David Alvarez.

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