If you want search engine traffic, then you want backlinks. You want authority webpages linking to your content. That’s a very basic part of search engine optimization.
But did you know that there is a difference between links from actual well-written content and footer links?
No matter how powerful or how weak the page, Google (and possibly other search engines) places importance on the actual location of backlinks on a page.
Why?
Why does Google do this? To be able to distinguish natural backlinks from artificial blog comments, from useless paid links.
Although Google is open to allowing webmasters to try and rank higher in their ever-changing algorithm, it does want to know what links can be considered “real” and separate those backlinks from quick write-and-go InBound links from techniques such as forum posting.
What This Means For You
Avoid techniques that don’t create in-content backlinks. These techniques aren’t going to mean much to the world’s most powerful search engine, and it won’t bring you the results you’re looking for.
SEO isn’t a science. It’s an art. I really just go with the flow when it comes to SEO myself, and you should too. I don’t think of techniques. I don’t do blog comments for the backlinks, I do it for the discussion with other bloggers. I do however, take the time to guest post on other blogs after I’ve written for my own. Doing this allows me to build powerful in-content backlinks to my website completely naturally.
What Else?
Search engines love content that gives users a reason to use that search engine again. Remember, their end goal is to give the visitor what they are looking for. And content is what people are looking for when they use search engines, not affiliate products or any other marketing garbage you can throw their way. So the best way to build influential links to your website is to use content.
Google’s ranking system is complicated. But as the web develops we hope that we can better explain ourselves and our websites to search engines.
For example, HTML 5 is nearly here. The biggest change from the previous version is that there are now tags that we can use to clean up and organize our code into sections. This can potentially change the way search engines index our websites.
A new tag that is introduced in HTML 5 is <article> – this tag tells search engines (if they choose to take advantage of this) exactly where your content is. It tells them which links should be considered “real”, and which ones should be considered “fake”. This is just one example of how HTML 5 is going to make links from content even more powerful.
That’s it. Links are links. But links from content are the links you want to have pointing at your site.
Thanks for reading!
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