Think of ranking as an election. The candidate with the most votes wins. Votes in this case are links from other websites to yours. If you can get more quality links from other websites to yours than your competition can, you win.
That’s the simple version. There are a few things to keep in mind.
1. Not All Links Are Equal
A link from Amazon or Yahoo for example, would carry more weight than a link from Joe Bobs Red Truck site.
Links from sites within your niche typically carry more weight than links not related to your product or service. So if you are selling clothing, get links from other clothing sites. You can do a little lateral thinking here and get links from sites related to clothing. Perhaps fashion advice sites, or celebrity fan pages etc.
2. Don’t Try Trick Google
Google does not like tricks. They have more PHD’s working on ways to figure out how to block aggressive SEO methods than I’ve had lap dances. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing, don’t try it. You risk getting banned.
Google wants to see a natural backlink structure. It does not look natural if you have a site called “Daves Motorcycles” and 95% of the links pointing to your site say “Harley Davidsons for Sale”. Make sense?
The following would look more natural. Let’s say you have 100 backlinks.
- Daves Motorcycles – 50 links
- DavesMotorcycles.com – 15 links
- www.davesmotorcycles.com – 10 links
- Harley Davidsons for Sale – 15 links
- Daves Harley Davidsons – 10 links
3. Build Links to Your Site Consistently
It does not look natural for a new site to come out the blocks with 100 links in month 1, 100 in month 2 and then nothing thereafter. Either maintain the rate over an extended period of time and be able to justify how you came about them, or start slowly.
I recommend adding your site to web directories with one time listing fees initially. This builds a nice base of links. New sites can probably add 10 – 20 backlinks per month for the first 6 months. Feel free to experiment, that’s just my recommendation.
I will write a new post on the various ways to build backlinks to your site shortly. This will include writing articles, sponsoring blog posts, directory submissions, press releases and more.