You can find many types of backlink building strategies, from simple to complex. These strategies come in three basic flavors: good, bad, and spam.
Let me go through them in reverse order of preference.
The first popular backlink strategy is to use automated software to spam blog comment sections and create user profiles on sites you never plan to use or participate in their forums. This strategy works quickly, but is usually very short-lived, as angry site owners quickly remove links. Search engines have also caught on to this method and will simply ignore most backlinks created to a site using this method once it is discovered.
Also, this strategy annoys site owners because of the time they have to spend deleting all the spam they receive from people using this method. Do you want thousands of webmasters to spam your blogs and sites?
I hope not.
The next strategy that I will call the bad method is when the backlinks are built with an unnatural method. The old linkwheels of the past are a good example. They leave a definitive footprint that search engines can clearly see. Link trading incorrectly can also be considered a bad strategy. The “I’ll exchange links with your site” method of the past just doesn’t work anymore. There are ways to exchange links that fall into good strategy, but that is beyond the scope of this article. Simply put, any backlink strategy that builds backlinks in an unnatural way can be labeled as bad.
Now that you know what strategies not to use, let’s move on to good backlinking strategies.
The main key to a good backlink strategy is the diversity of natural-looking backlinks built over time from primarily relevant sites. Note that I didn’t say backlinks only from relevant sites.
A key factor in natural backlinking is having a variety of natural-looking backlinks of different types and in different locations.
Typical types of backlinks include anchor text that uses the exact keyword phrase, the keyword phrase plus additional text, and text that contains no keyword phrase at all.
Typical backlink locations include the article body, sidebars, headers, footers, link pages, etc.
Giving up bad backlink and spam strategies and taking the time to follow a good backlink strategy will pay off in the long run.
If you really want to build backlinks that will help you climb the search engine rankings, you need to do proper tracking. You need enough data to be able to quickly analyze what works and what doesn’t. You should be able to determine if your backlink strategy looks natural or not.
