Is it true that SEO and quality backlinks are inseparable?
Yes, that’s true - SEO is all about quality backlinks, and vice versa. In fact, your website’s link profile should be the center of your overall search engine optimization strategy. Much like any other aspect of SEO, quality backlinks would hardly give you any prompt and measurable results overnight. Most commonly, organic link building strategy is an ongoing doing driven by thorough attention and persistent work to keep a successful outreach. And you can make your every effort work - all you need is to closely track the process and know every website you are linked with. At first glance, that might seem a daunting task.
But don’t worry - just go out and use one of the following online tools to keep monitoring your backlink profile, just as I did for my own blog. Here they are - Semalt Analyzer (Semalt), Open Site Explorer (Moz), or Rank Signals. That way, make sure every backlink is relevant itself, as well as has an equally relevant anchor text. The thing is that you should never have generic anchors like “click on this link.” You are recommended to get them more specific, and of course with at least one keyword to make a brief suggestion, so that a user would know what can be expected.
Good SEO needs quality backlinks
Most commonly, the major search engines (like Google itself) are determining every website’s popularity, relevancy, page, and domain authority based on its backlink profile quality. That’s why organic backlinks are actually among the most powerful ranking signals to be awarded a higher position in the list of the search results. I dare say, backlinks are arguably the most important ranking factor, particularly regarding the most recent algorithm update delivered by Google. As a result, all about backlinks you should have is their quality and organic nature, not just quantity of poor, or God forbid automated links.
What makes a quality backlink?
According to the experts in SEO, quality backlinks are determined by just a few factors. First of all, quality backlink always comes from a relevant website with a high trustworthiness and authority. Secondly, it should consistently generate web traffic to your own site or blog. Next, each quality backlink should be embedded with the right anchor text - either with exact keyword match, long-tail key phrase, or at least synonymical reference. At last, quality backlinks for SEO are never acquired at ease. Hence they aren't likely to be found in the content text. Keep in mind, however, that diversity is the key to link building success. I mean having a diverse backlink portfolio shaped with different links coming from many different places with unequal page rank and domain authority - will be seen as a positive organic ranking signal from the viewpoint of Google, as well as the rest of major search engines.
Red flag
Unfortunately, people are too often calling for ranking penalties - just doing their best to build more backlinks at all cost, which results in violating the main search guidelines. There are numerous ways invented specifically to deceive the search engines. Reacting to this fact, Google has completely disapproved the following Grey Hat practices like hidden links or covered text, paid backlinks, growing them on “link farms,” link exchanges (wheels), etc. Of course, some of these schemes are still used by too careless webmasters or novice site owners. Nevertheless, you should keep away from using any manipulative schemes. Otherwise, it can easily come to extremes when everything ends up with the whole website completely banned from the search results - once and forever.
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