We all know the internet is a great resource, but many of us don’t know how to use it effectively. We’ve been conditioned to rely on SEO, or search engine optimization, as a way to get backlinks.
Thats because people just assume that if theres a link in a certain spot, that means theres a good chance of getting backlinks from that spot. Google is in fact very much aware of this, and you can see why. The amount of effort needed to get a link in a certain spot is proportional to the amount of traffic (or backlinks) to that spot. Which is why you need to know what your competitors are doing if youre going to be on the search results.
One way to get backlinks from a certain spot is to “seed” it with links from other sites. In other words, your link farm will be planted with links from a variety of sources. This can be a good idea from a SEO perspective, but what happens if you don’t have time to do this? Then you have to search for every other search engine that is going to link to your site.
The problem is that because we are so inundated with links these days it is very easy for search engines to get wrapped up in trying to figure out what we are, what we are not, and what our competitors are doing. We have to remember that this is a game that we all play, and we have to remember that the goal is to be the best at what we do.
I recently talked to a few marketers at the top of the search engines. One said to me, “Google and its sister sites are now very good at ranking websites based on the number of links, not the quality of the links. They will see a link from a website that has a lot of quality links and an equally good website and they’ll rank them higher in search results.
This is a very good lesson. As we all know, the more links a website has, the better it is. So if there are a lot of quality links, then you should rank for higher.
So when you think about how many links there are to a website, how many are legitimate-looking links from reputable websites, and how many are “organic” links from websites that are linked to from other websites, you can see why it’s so important to rank for the number of links to your website.
The truth, however, is that there are fewer links than there are good links to your site. And while there are a lot of links, there are fewer, so the websites linked to are very much less good, and a lot less reputable. So it’s actually a good (albeit small) indication that your site is being outranked by the websites linked to it.
This is a huge problem. It’s one of the reasons that the top links are often not the top organic links. It’s also an indication that your site is being outranked by websites with a high number of irrelevant links.
The number of relevant links (in the form of external links) to your site are a good indicator of how good your site is.