Must Read: How to Build Backlinks

How to Build Backlinks That Search Engines Will Notice

Three fifths of marketers believe that building backlinks is “somewhat difficult” or “very difficult.” Have you had trouble learning how to build backlinks? This guide can help. In this guide, you'll learn the biggest principle for building backlinks—a principle that's used by the best search engine marketers and the search engines themselves. You'll also find out how to build backlinks on a wide variety of different websites, so that you can diversify your web presence and prepare for whatever comes next in internet search trends.

The #1 How to Build Backlinks Principle: No Shortcuts

When people first learn about building backlinks, they start asking, well, how hard can it be? After all, there are many guides online that show you how to build backlinks, and many of these guides suggest using article marketing services or press release websites that can give you dozens of backlinks within an hour or two. Why not just use those?

It's true, those methods are easy. What you may not know is that search engines have started to defend against websites using them. Because so many websites trying to use these services were essentially spam sites, Google and other search engines have cracked down on websites that are building backlinks exclusively through low-quality websites like press release and article spinning sites.

Why the crackdown? Because fundamentally, Google doesn't want you to know how to build backlinks easily. In fact, Google would prefer that websites didn't focus on building backlinks at all as a search engine optimization strategy, and confined themselves only to organic backlinks generated because someone enjoys your content.

As search engines have become more sophisticated, they've gotten better at identifying people who are using those old “how to build backlinks” guides. Use their advice on building backlinks and you could find your website's ranking dropping rapidly. There are no good shortcuts for how to build backlinks—nothing that will let you build hundreds or thousands of links in a day. There are, however, ways to start building backlinks slowly and steadily that can make your website the top result in searches.

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Like

Search engines are just computer programming, and search engine optimization marketers around the world work diligently to find out exactly what kind of backlink efforts work best with that programming. They have found several common features of the types of backlink building that search engines seem to prefer.

Search engines tend to give better rankings to people who work on building backlinks that are contextual, rather than random. If your link pattern is very random, search engines are likely to perceive this as spam. Building backlinks to websites that are closely related to your site and are considered popular, high-quality websites will be much better.

You should make sure not to use the same keyword phrase every time for your links. Search engines love variety—because variety is more common when building backlinks organically. Try to vary your keywords, link text, and even just the types of websites that you're using. Don't just use Facebook posts or blog comments, in other words—try something new!

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Hate

In the process of building backlinks that work, many search engine marketers have also discovered strategies that do not work. In some cases, these strategies rarely or never worked, while in others, they worked for a time until new algorithm updates accounted for people trying to game the system.

In brief, Google—and other search engines—don't like when people bring the quality of web results down by trying to improve their own search rankings. This means that if you're spamming blogs, you're not building backlinks that are likely to be considered high quality by Google, Bing, or anyone else. If you're using the same keywords over and over, or your copy is barely readable because the keywords are inserted so awkwardly, you've taken the wrong advice about how to build backlinks.

Just about any method that search engine marketers have developed to generate huge numbers of backlinks quickly will fail today. Why? Even if you find a new method for building backlinks fast, the sheer speed of it is likely to raise red flags about your content. Google's algorithms know that websites don't engage in building backlinks of any reasonable quality at a rate of thousands a day. You should ramp up your backlinking slowly, so that it's much harder to detect the artificial nature of your link building efforts.

This means that some of the most popular tools of search engine marketers in years past no longer work in 2012 and 2013. Instead of using article spinning services that put the same content (or very similar versions of content, often edited by a computer program) into many different websites, today's search engine marketers are having to work harder for a smaller number of quality backlinks.

Building Backlinks Using High Quality Websites

If you want to get the most bang for your buck when building backlinks, you'll need to have your links on high quality websites. One of the best things that you can do for yourself when starting to learn how to build backlinks is to learn what kinds of websites are considered the most trusted and highest quality—not only in general, but in your specific field of law. Learning the big players in your specific field will help you target guest blogging opportunities and other chances for contextual link building.

When you build backlinks using these high quality websites, it may take a little more time to get each link in place. However, each of them will be considered a high quality backlink that is worth much more than if you had inserted dozens of non-contextual backlinks on a wide variety of low-quality sites. In other words, it only seems to take more time—you'll still get a better return on investment from link building on high quality sites.