While social media marketing thrives on engagement, getting high quality backlinks are still an advantageous pursuit in order to build your online reputation with the search engines. Backlinks are simply a link to your website, from another website. While this sounds simple enough, the trick is making sure that the website that is linking to you is a high quality website that has favorable search engine results on their own. The next determination is if people click through that link to visit your website. Of course likes, comments and shares about the link is another way to add value to that specific link.
Paying someone to post thousands of backlinks all over the internet is a big no-no and there are specific backlinks that will hurt your site rather than help it, say backlinks that from spam sites. Instead, aim for getting backlinks placed on high quality sites on a more personal level. Article marketing using highly popular article marketing sites, such as ezinearticles.com is a great way to get valuable backlinks because they are well respected in the search engines. While you cannot include backlinks within the articles you market, your link can show up in the author biography. The better received your article is and the more valuable readers consider it to be, the more you will be respected as an expert and the more people will click through the link to visit your website.
Another way to get significantly valued backlinks is to submit your site to high quality directories such as DMOZ. There are hundreds of directories to choose from, so make sure you are submitting to directories that have the best page rankings and are considered to be valuable resource directories. You can also gain quality backlinks by posting articles that feature reviews of websites that have complementary products or services such as yours. When you notify the website owner that you have posted the article, and if it is a great review, they will be more than happy to post a link to it from their own website or social media sites.
Gaining backlinks should be a continued process for the best results. It is better to get six backlinks a week from the best websites on a consistent basis than it is to get thousands of backlinks from spam sites in a single push. Not only will the huge quantity alert search engines and risk having your site penalized or blocked from their engines, but it the links will not be placed on websites that your target market is most likely to find in order to discover your products and services.
