It has been a long held belief that a big part of SEO is building a huge number of backlinks pointing back to your website in order to rank well in Google search results. While this strategy did work to a certain point prior to the Google Algorithm updates, it definitely doesn’t work now. And if you are using link building to improve your rankings you need to be very careful as it could damage your website rankings beyond repair.
I have seen the results of the massive link buidling method first hand. I took over the SEO strategy management of 3 clients about 8 months ago, who all came to me after employing another SEO company. All 3 websites were ranking very well for a large amount of keyword phrases and a huge majority of those keywords weren’t even mentioned on the website or related to any content on the website. It was obvious that black hat methods had been used to gain the rankings. On further investigation, it was found that the rankings were obtained simply by gaining thousands of backlinks to the website using certain keyword phrases as the anchor text. (Anchor text is the word/s with content that is hyperlinked to another URL). As soon as Google started rolling out their Penguin updates, the rankings of all 3 websites plummeted in a huge way and they weren’t ranking for any keywords at all.
When gaining any links from another website back to your website you need to ensure that those links are on a quality website that is producing quality content and it is in a related industry. You also need to ensure that the anchor text used is varied and doesn’t just involve keywords. You also want those links pointing to all pages of your website and not just the home page. If you are employing a SEO company to do your link building for you, you need to be keeping a very close eye on this to ensure it is being done correctly. You also need to ensure that they are not using automated software in order to build those links for you.
However, in my opinion, link building is not a focal point for SEO. If you are paying someone to build backlinks to your website I feel you are wasting your money and ultimately it could ruin all rankings that you currently have.
SEO is about search engine optimisation which means optimising your website so that the search engines rewards your site with good rankings. How is this done? Firstly, you begin with a good website structure which includes neat and clean coding and design, optimised meta data, and a website that is easy to navigate for the visitor. Then you need to work on publishing good quality and useful content on the website.
By producing good quality content that is useful to your target market your content and website links are going to be shared naturally. These are the backlinks that count.
If you need to outsource the SEO of your website due to time or knowledge constraints, then you need to have the website optimised correctly and then have someone produce good quality content for your website. Once the content is published it can then be promoted via the many channels available. This will get your content noticed and then the sharing and linking will start to happen. You will then see your rankings improve which ultimately means more traffic to your website.
These are the exact strategies we use for our clients.
I would love to hear your thoughts...