Is Your Backlink Campaign Like A Bad Haircut?

A good linkbuilding campaign involves working and waiting… but you need more traffic for your new website. You want backlinks, and you want them now.


Enter temptation.


Lurking around every corner of the web is someone selling (or even giving away) a long list of backlinks and promising them within minutes. It would take months for most of us to get that number of backlinks doing it the right way.


Temptation wins.


Deep down you know better, but you decide to try some SEO shortcuts. The results are quick and terrible: They’re lopsided, full of gaps, and they make you look bad to the search engines. It’s kind of like getting a bad haircut.


On the other hand, legitimate backlinking practices can be painfully slow, but the results are balanced and beautiful. They make you look good to the search engines.


Seasoned blogger and internet marketer Daniel Lew says that when Google sees a huge influx of new backlinks to a website, the search engine thinks the site is trying to beat its algorithm. Search engine bots detect shortcuts just as easily as we can spot a bad haircut.


This is why you want to focus on the quality of your backlinks instead of how quickly you can acquire them. Defeat temptation at every turn. Simply accept that the best results are worth working for and worth waiting for. Here are a few ways to do it right:


Commit


Decide to commit time and effort to your campaign on a regular basis. Build a schedule devoted just to backlinking work. You don’t get one good haircut and say you’re done with haircuts forever. You have to continually get more haircuts to stay looking sharp. It’s the same with backlinking; you have to keep it up as part of your regular work schedule. To help you stay on track, here’s a free SEO spreadsheet posted by Mark Nunney at Wordtracker.com.


One-Way Is The Right Way


Focus on building one-way backlinks rather than reciprocal backlinks. Reciprocal backlinks are becoming less valuable in SEO. The best practice for building one-way backlinks includes article submission, directory submission, relative blog comments, and forum discussions.


To get the most backlinks out of your hard work, use your highest-quality blog posts as material for articles, how-to videos, tutorials, podcasts, ebooks, and special reports. Syndicate them all and make sure to include your link on each one.


More one-way links can come from anywhere. Always be thinking about backlink prospects as you network on forums and social sites. Anyone you meet is a potential backlinker, especially after you build a bit of rapport. Mark Nunney of Wordtracker.com supplies another free spreadsheet to help you keep up with your backlinking prospects.


Analyze Your Competition


Learn to analyze the backlinking profiles of your competitors, and take cues from them. This is a great way to find out who’s linking to what, which is very valuable information. Your competitors’ backlinks are possible backlinks for you as well.


Wiep Knol recently pointed out at Search Engine Land that analyzing your competitors’ backlinks can also give you ideas for new content. Find out what people are linking to on your competitors’ sites, and you’ve got fresh revelation on what’s considered hot content in your niche.


You can conduct your analysis using Google Analytics or other SEO software. I’ve just begun using Link Builder software by Wordtracker, which makes the process really easy:


Just one click shows your competitors’ backlinks, and your own.


Link Builder analyzes each link and tells you what kind of link it is: blog, directory, media, social, etc.


All the information derived from the software is displayed in easy-to-read graphs.


I highly recommend Link Builder if you’re serious about building quality backlinks to your website. It’s like having an expert working for you, but is much less expensive. They’re offering a 7-Day Free Trial right now, so definitely check it out.


Having the right approach and the right tools will help you build scores of quality backlinks over a natural period of time. The search engines will like and reward you.


You’ll look fantastic, regardless of your haircut.