This One-two Punch of Backlink Strategy Will Blow Your Competition Away

Welcome to my teashop, fellow bloggers and webmasters! Today, we gossip about backlinks. Would you like some cake with your tea? No? Okay then, here we go…

So, what the heck is a backlink anyway? 

Always keep an eye on your link data! | Unsplash

The modern digital marketing strategy stands on two pillars — content and backlinks. Backlinks are other people providing a hyperlink to your intended page, via their own blogs, social media, or Web 2.0 platforms. For example, I like the Polk T15 speakers, so I posted a review of them on a subreddit and put a link to their product page. Most of the time, content and backlinks complement each other. 

A young padawan on her SEO path can take either or both of the following ways: natural backlinks, and editorial backlinks. Both are immensely important! Let’s delve deeper. 

Natural Backlinks

These are the holy grail of all SEO. This type of backlinking occurs when people (not working for you) like your content or product so much they take the effort to mention it by link in their personal blogs or social media. Like my speaker thingie above. It’s completely natural, nobody told me to do it; I did it because the product is that good. 

According to Google, and any ethically sane market researcher, a non-paid linkified mention of anything is the highest form of praise online. You can dump billions of beautifully crafted words for a product and it still won’t be able to compete with that one link. 

Digital marketing managers go crazy for these links. Naturally! 

Editorial Backlinks

These links are given by industry experts doing professional discussions on their websites or social media, and they are indeed in some way benefiting from it. Maybe they’re using an affiliate link, or maybe it’s a guest post from an authority writer featuring this link for which she may get something. 

Either way, if done properly, these links can be very high-quality when used naturally (where the reader will genuinely benefit from clicking on that link, not just for getting the traffic). Blog and site editors have control over these links, not common people. 

When coming from authoritative domains, these backlinks contribute immense value to the search rankings of your page. 

Finished your cuppa? Here, take another. Look, make sure you value quality over quantity with backlinks. Gone are the days of the black hat SEO when you could just submit copy-pasted data to link farms (so-called “directories”) and get a billion backlinks to prop up your page. Nowadays, Google will actually penalize the sites that are still doing that crap! 

The best way to get backlinks is two Cs — content and collaboration. Make great stuff and write awesome pages that people would really love or benefit from, then network them to people who would want to mention you. Keep up the good work! 

Are you sure you don’t want a cake?