SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 6
Link Building Services
We wrote about backlinks earlier, but wanted to give this particular subject some more “air time” because of the implications they have to your websites overall health.
Many SEO companies will tell you one of the most important things you can do to gain traction in you search ratings, is to build links. These companies offer “hundreds” or even “thousands” of “High Quality backlinks” from “high PR sites in your niche”. (PR is short for Page Rank). As with many things we have talked about during our series, this was true – at one time, now, this is a sure fire way to loose standings in your search efforts.
First off, we firmly believe that backlinks are not as important as the once were, and that more efforts need to be placed on Semantic Markup, quality content, and Social Media interaction. With that being said, backlinks are still important, what has changed is the way in which their importance is ranked.
The Truth
You do want to spend time building quality links to your website. One or two well placed links from high ranking trusted sites within your niche are worth gold. These links do not happen over night, cannot be built through “automated software”, or through “link agreements” that a lot of SEO companies seem to offer.
These HIGH QUALITY links are like relationships, they take time to build, and most of them must be done through personal interaction, to the point of reaching to site owners and asking them directly to link to your website.
The Myth
You must build hundreds of backlinks a month to be successful. This is not true. Think about it from this perspective. A brand new website pops up on Monday that deals with cell phone repair. If by wednesday there are 1000 websites linking to that new website, and those website topics range from baby clothes, to auto parts, what does that tell the search engines? That you paid someone to “build links” for the purposes of gaining higher rankings.
Now, lets say a website pops up in January, steadily post articles, has a few links on other websites that occurred naturally, and then in July that website wrote an article on how to repair your cracked iPhone for free, and CNET picked that up and linked to the site. That one link would carry more weight, then 10,000 links built with a service.
The Lie
You must place as many links as you can using keyword anchor text in your links. Again, this USED to be true, and was a quick way of gaining high rankings. Only about 20% of your links should actually use keyword anchor text. Even the 20% is not an exact science, but the point is, most of your links should be truly natural links such as the ones that say “CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE”
By now you should be seeing a pattern with our recent articles. A lot of companies our using old and shady techniques that invovle short cuts for what we term as “Blackhat SEO”. Even before the recent updates to the search engine algorithms, if you produced quality content, honest links that were not paid for through a link building service, and were in the race for the long haul, you have no doubt seen your websites flourish, and will continue to do so in the future.
Stay tuned for part 7 of our series tomorrow
