BACKLINKS
Perhaps the most important off-site SEO strategy and most misunderstood strategy is something called backlinks.
Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Google developed this part of their algorithm a long time ago and while its become more sophisticated over time, it really hasn’t changed much. The idea is that the more websites that link to your website, the more important you are. So a website with a lot of backlinks means a lot of people are talking about them for a good reason so they should rank very well. And vice versa.
Why That is too Broad
That description of backlinks above is too broad because it leaves out the quality factor. By definition, we talk about backlinks in terms of quantity. But the quality matters even more. If you have 100 backlinks from low-quality websites and I have 10 backlinks from high-quality websites, all other things equal, I should rank better than you. 1 really powerful website linking to you can be worth more than 1000 other websites linking to you. It’s worth putting in the extra effort to build quality.
How Companies Do it Wrong
A lot of Indianapolis SEO companies get this wrong because they take the easy way out. Real backlinks – ones that are powerful and skyrocket you up the search results, take a ton of effort. Well, its a lot easier to just build a long list of low-quality links and then show your client all these ‘great’ things you did. Unfortunately, the ‘work’ won’t actually work and you won’t see any benefits from your backlinking strategy without putting in the grind.
How to Build Quality Backlinks
To build quality backlinks, you first have to create quality content. Something worth linking to. Then, you have to find websites that would want to link to that content – likely because it would provide additional value to their own website visitors. Building that kind of content takes time and effort. The outreach and the “nos” you’ll get until you finally get a yes take time. But there is no substitute for putting in the work to get quality backlinks and skipping the low-quality shortcuts that only look good on paper. We’ll help you build high-quality links that destroy your competitors in the search engines.
Backlinks are complicated and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. But it’s really a straight-forward process if you do it the right way.
You don’t need a huge backlink portfolio unless you sell pencils online or something crazy like that. But if you’re a local business or medium-sized business, you really only need a handful of high-quality backlinks. But they have to be built organically. The shortcuts stopped working about 10 years ago.