Here I will try to explain to you what backlinking is all about and why it is so important for every website and some search engine strategies that you should absolutely avoid. A short story with “Pappu” before I get started in backlinks.
Who the heck is Pappu?
Imagine you and your friend, Pappu, who by the way is just a normal bloke with no extraordinary skills, is walking along the road. You see Barack Obama, the American president, walking towards you from the opposite direction. He walks straight up to you guys. Says hi to Pappu and chit chats with him for half an hour. You are lost and perplexed.
What the heck just happened?
Did Barack Obama talk to pappu?
You are stunned and amazed. You ask Pappu about it and he brushes it aside. You guys continue walking and you meet the president of Germany. Even the German president talks to your friend Pappu for half an hour. You are shocked again. You have a feeling Pappu is someone important. This continues till you meet ten presidents and all the ten presidents chats with Pappu.
Outside Perspective
Now if a third party is to watch the entire proceedings and the access which one of you deserves higher ranking, who do you think will win. You or your friend Pappu? If you haven’t guessed already, Pappu will have a higher ranking.
This is what search engines are trying to access though backlinks. Backlinks are just connections from one website to another. It can be in the form of comments, guest posting or the owner of the blog mentioning your website in his post. Barack Obama is the Page Rank (PR) 10 website. The search engine concludes that outbound links from page rank 10 website deserves some attention.
You might be better and more awesome than Pappu. But the search engine is not able to see your awesomeness. In order for you to establish your awesomeness you need Backlinks. Right now great content alone will not do you any good. One of the common mistakes done by bloggers is to create good and unique content but fail to market their blog hoping that their good content will generate organic traffic. When nothing turns up they get dejected and conclude blogging sucks.
There are many factors in determining search results. Google uses more than 100 factors to determine the results. Social Media has also become an integral part of rankings. Apart from all of these, backlinks still play a very important role. Get quality Backlinks from top website. If Pappu gets “Hi” from a terrorist, I don’t think you will be impressed. Neither will search engines be impressed.
Take Indian Premier League (IPL) for example
Imagine the excitement at the beginning of an IPL (IPL is a very popular club cricket in India) game. Everybody is excited and pumped up. Cheerleaders are dancing. Suddenly one dude streaks past the field, naked. Everybody looks at him. Or at least some people look before he is caught and dealt with. You probably might be wondering why I am telling you this. Link farms and SPAMMY links does the same to your website. You might get an initial attention before you are identified and deindexed.
Using link farms to get backlinks can improve your search results in the short run, but once the search engines realise, your website will no longer be receive organic traffic, you can even get deindexed and all your efforts can go in vain. My advice, avoid link farms and spammy links.
Creating Backlinks the White Hat way?
- Guest posting, like I just did here in HBB (Thanks HBB for this opportunity). While guest posting make sure the content matches your audience. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this procedure.
- Article submission to top directories like, www.huffingtonpost.com and www.squidoo.com. Since these are already have good ranking, your articles gets ranked faster.
- YouTube channels. Videos gets indexed very fast and is displayed in the Google results too. You can give your website link at the bottom of the post to drive traffic to your blog.