Basically, off-page factors can be boiled down to one main concept.

Backlinks

A backlink is any time a hyperlink from a page not inside your own domain points to one of the pages on your website.

Backlinks are what you’ll find so many SEO companies talking about. “We can get you 1000 links in a day!” Yeah, great… For those of you that have dabbled in SEO or are even reading this blog because you are looking to hire an SEO company, I have some important news.

Don’t fall for the bait!

While backlinking is extremely important, I need to take a moment to reshape what you may already know about getting links or make sure if you are new to links that you get some good information upfront.

Rule 1: All links to your pages are NOT created equal.

Getting 1000 links in a day can be entirely worthless. If you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ll know that getting links from pages that aren’t even indexed by the search engines can be largely useless. Every link pointing to your site does two things. It gives you Authority and/or Reputation.

Authority is when you have a link from a website that has a high amount of PageRank.  Reputation comes in the from what that link says in the anchor text.  Having good link reputation in both your on-page and off-page SEO can have a significant impact on your rankings.

That said, a link passing you no Authority (because the page it is on isn’t indexed) and no Reputation (because it just has www.example.com in the anchor) will be almost entirely useless for your ranking efforts.

Rule 2:  Be natural and be honest with your link building efforts.

Here’s a quote directly from the help documents from Google Webmaster Tools:

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

I’m sure you’ve thought; “What if I just make a bunch of websites about my market place and have them all link to me?” or “Isn’t there some automated link trading system I can use to just pass links back and forth with every other website?”

Let’s pause for a moment and think about what the internet is.

…

The internet is basically trillions upon trillions of links.  These links are the backbone of how we move around the internet, how we get from one page to another.  Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “messing” with the whole premise of the internet would be frowned upon?  You bet!

If you engage in excessive link trading, building external pages to just spam links on, or several other “black hat” methods.  You will ultimately be caught and slapped by Google and the other search engines.

It may not happen instantly, but our goal with SEO is to create traffic to our website in the hopes of building an actual business.  I’m not sure about you, but I would want all the hard work I’m going to put into my business to get crushed because I decided to take a less than desirable way to get my traffic.

If you develop good content and have good marketing, you can build links on the internet quickly, effectively, and naturally.  People will link to good, engaging, and relevant content.

These are what I consider to be the two main points to understand before starting any link building campaign for a new website.  These two simple rules can save you hours, days, and even years of time… not to mention the potential millions in lost sales you would experience from having your traffic basically disappear overnight.

Next time we’ll talk about a few other rules that I like to consider before starting my link building process, but that aren’t necessarily rules that would ruin your website if not followed.

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