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The employment of backlinking strategies is one of the most prevalent methods of building a site’s visibility on search engines, but it is often misconstrued. Backlinking is procuring links to one’s website to improve its overall search engine visibility. A clear understanding of backlinking strategies is vital for any SEO professional to drive SERP growth. Several digital marketing courses provide the necessary know-how of digital marketing, including efficient backlinking strategies.
While assessing the quality of a backlink, search engines consider factors like relevance, trust rank, anchor text, link neighborhood, social distribution, and link popularity, amongst others. Therefore, all backlinks you try to obtain must be diverse, authoritative, and offer relevant information. A firm may develop organic backlinks over a period or create inorganic backlinks for quick results. However, there’s a reason why the latter is called inorganic and is generally recognized and weeded out by search engines.
When designing backlinks, there are some standard practices and tactics that every SEO professional ought to follow. In the following article, we break down the differences between inorganic and organic backlinking strategies and why inorganic backlinking is frowned upon by search engines:
Organic Backlinking:
Organic or natural backlinks are developed by following logical operations, such as publishing content or PR activities. Organic backlinks are diverse, authoritative, and relevant. These links are given to the websites without any prior action by the owners. For example, an online magazine running an article may include a corporation’s website on its website. The procurement of organic backlinks indeed takes time. Still, the organic backlinking strategy results are sustainable over long periods and provide long-term benefits to your website.
Designing an Organic Backlinking Strategy:
A good content marketing strategy forms the basis of an active organic backlinking strategy. SEO professionals strive to produce shareable and distributable content by creating organic website backlinks. Hence, this white-hat content marketing strategy is the most lucrative way to continuously design and build organic backlinks.
Inbound marketing, a subset of content marketing, involves developing relevant content that drives traffic to one’s website through backlinks. While inbound marketing is used directly for increasing traffic, search engines also evaluate a website’s overall traffic during assessments of websites. Furthermore, increased website traffic can increase the likelihood of your site obtaining organic backlinks from users.
Inorganic Backlinks:
Inorganic backlinks are developed through link exchanges and purchases from various sites that may not necessarily be relevant to the website owners’ content. These kinds of backlinks can either be outreach or self-created links. Inorganic backlinks have the disadvantage of having less value than organic backlinks in search assessments and can, therefore, significantly affect your website’s SERP. Not only this, search engines occasionally refresh their algorithms to identify and penalize the sites with a high number of inorganic backlinks.
For instance, Google released Google Panda in 2011, an update to its search algorithm to identify low-quality websites operating solely for SEO purposes. Google Panda went ahead to decrease the visibility of these low-content websites in its search results, thus effectively attacking sites that employed inorganic backlinking. As a result, the places that used several black hat strategies saw a steep decline in their search rankings.
What sets organic backlinks apart from inorganic backlinks?
Many website owners end up employing inorganic backlinking strategies without meaning to. This not only results in a reduction of their search engine rating but also gives fruitless results. Following are the measures that one can take to make sure that their backlinking strategies are attracting the right kind of attention:
Consistency:
The key to developing an effective organic backlinking strategy is consistently adding backlinks to the website over time. Search engines are tailored to identify a sudden spike in a website’s backlinks, signaling them to take actions such as penalization.
Relevance:
If all the backlinks to your website originate from one or two sources, search engines will likely assume that your site is irrelevant and is resorting to black hat tactics. Thus, an organic backlinking strategy ensures the content is sourced from various authentic and related sources.
Keyword Optimization:
While it may be tempting for seo professionals to litter internal website content with relevant keywords to improve its ratings, overdoing it can land your site in trouble. Spamming your website content with an excessive number of keywords will be read by most search engines as black hat SEO and may inadvertently lead to penalization.
Trust Rank:
Search engine algorithms also consider the search factor while assessing websites for black-and-white hat practices. These algorithms check the domain’s history of harboring spam. So, if you’re employing backlinks on a field with a history of sheltering spam, the search engine will likely assess you as a black hat practitioner.
Domain Neighbourhood:
Search engines rank the domain where the link to your website appears and assess the connections to which the concerned fields link themselves. Hence, organic backlinks have a trusted environment and clean links to those domains. This is how search engines thoroughly evaluate the quality of backlinks and thus estimate your site’s rate and rank.
Popularity and Distribution:
While assessing a website, search engine crawlers also evaluate the distribution of backlinks on social media platforms. Essentially, the more popular a site is, the more organic backlinks it will generate. Hence, if your website has spam and unnatural links, they are likely to be recognized as inorganic backlinks and will be weeded out by the search engines.
In a Nutshell:
While developing an effective backlinking strategy is crucial to proactively marketing your content, ensuring it comes under organic backlinking is vital. Thus, practicing an optimized and structural approach to your backlinking strategy always helps ensure that your efforts give you the web presence you desire.
