The backlinks pointing to your website are one of the most important factors that determine the position of your website on the search engines results pages (SERP’s). Unfortunately for all of us, it’s not easy to get good quality backlinks. You could compare link building with getting in shape after the holidays. Let’s have a look…
1. Work Hard (No Short Cuts)
It doesn’t matter if you want to lose weight after the holidays or if you want tobuild high quality links: it’s the same for both: you have to invest time and effort. You cannot lose 30 pounds in a month and you also cannot get your website on Google’s first result page for a very competitive keyword in that time. If you want to get lasting results, you have to work continually on your links and the content of your web pages.
2. Be Consistent
SEO isn’t a one-shot solution. It doesn’t help your rankings much if you get many links at once and then stop building links. Search engines also consider how many websites link to your site over time.
It’s the same if you want to get in shape: doing a 12 hour workout on a single day and then doing nothing won’t help you to lose weight. It will be bad for your health. It’s the same with link building: if you build many links at once and then no links at all, search engines might think that you try to cheat them with a linking system. If you want to get in shape, you have to be consistent. You might not see immediate results, but there is a constant change and some day, you’ll find that you’re much thinner.
Link building works exactly like that. Don’t try to fool the search engines by joining link systems or buying links. Get one link at a time, optimize your pages and the rankings of your website will improve steadily.
3. Be Aware Of Scammers
The SEO industry is full of scammers that promise easy and quick solutions. You should be very careful. If something sounds too good to be true then it probably is. There are no easy and quick solutions and there are no secret tricks that nobody else knows about. The same applies to weight loss and fitness. There are lots of diet pills and miracle machines that look attractive and promise easy and quick results. However, these methods just don’t work.
4. Don’t Trick The System
There are a lot of diets and diet products out there that promise to help you to lose weight quickly. Unfortunately, you only lose water weight with these diets and you’ll get your old weight back soon. Link building is similar. Sometimes, some webmasters find a loophole in Google’s algorithm. These loopholes allow people to get on Google’s first result page without doing the hard work. This usually works for some weeks, but once Google or Bing finds out, websites that exploited the loophole are penalized and probably removed from the index. It’s very risky to use these methods to get high rankings because search engines don’t like spammers as it causes a poor user experience.
5. The result is worth it…
People who lose weight usually feel more healthy and happier. Being number one on Google’s result page for the right keyword can mean many more sales for your business. You have the choice: Don’t make the mistake to fall for rip-off products that promise easy and quick results without much work. These products don’t deliver long term results and even worse -they often put your website at risk of getting penalized and removed from the indexes!
