Website SEO For Dummies: The Backlink

I have fairly respectable prowess with IT hardware repair and automobile immobilizer systems. But I am a nobody when it comes to web development, SEO, or anything related to that. I am an active learner though and despite being a lifelong dumb dumb in general, the last 15 years or so have been a renaissance of sort for Yours Truly.

I mentioned SEO and wanted to pass along what I’ve learned about it. For my fellow dumb dumbs, SEO stand for “Search Engine Optimization”. In layperson’s terms, it’s manipulating your websites so that it shows up at the top of the list when a person searches for your goods and services or whatever else your website is trying to do. It’s actually very complicated and involves imbedded tags and keywords, but that’s just for starters. There’s practically an endless amount of things you can do to get your site higher exposure. Just creating a website and going live is never even close to enough. You have to cultivate it like a garden.

One of the biggest components towards getting your site optimized is pretty straightforward. You need a lot of inbound traffic and people need to actually visit it. The more people look at your website, the more it will gain stature. My sites, www.cdccellularrepair.com and www.franciscarkeys.com, have very modest traffic at the present time. The fact that I just wrote in the exact links to these sites is important and I’ll explain why. This is called “Backlinking” and it’s one of the most powerful tools in building your website’s prowess in the marketplace. Until now I really didn’t understand how important this method of attack really is. In fact, it’s one of the most crucial strategies towards growing your web presence.

So, what exactly is a “Backlink”? It’s very simple. It’s getting the link to your website placed on other websites. If people visiting someone else’s website can find a link to yours, that exponentially improves the inbound traffic, and it ultimately increases your visibility to customers. This is really important and something I personally need to work on with my sites.

Now it sounds simple, right? No way! It’s much harder than it sounds. Keep in mind that the owner of a website isn’t going to post a link to your site out of the goodness of their heart. Sometimes a mass media outlet might do it if they happen to be writing an article about your industry and you just so happen to be interviewed by them. But that doesn’t happen as often as you think. In most cases the owner of that other site is going to want something for it. Either money or some type of horse trading. It’s not free by any stretch.

OK, so we all now understand, in layperson’s terms, what backlinking is. Now the question is, how do you do it in the real world and what are the pitfalls? I’ll first say that the pitfalls are numerous. First, the whole concept of buying backlinks is prevalent. But what I’ve learned is that this practice is largely ineffective and sometimes not considered by the likes of Google and Bing as legitimate. They’ll block it out and you’ll just be throwing money down a rabbit hole or worse.

The truth is this. You need backlinks on quality websites with high traffic and name recognition. And that isn’t easy to accomplish. For example, with CDC Cellular Repair, if I could get my link on, say, Verizon Wireless’ website, that would be huge. But what are the odds that they would allow me to do it? Slim to none. Conversely, if I got the link on some rando website, that won’t accomplish anything because no one is looking at that site very often.

This is the problem with buying backlinks. There are tons of little companies online that claim to sell backlinks. They’ll charge you a monthly fee or a flat rate per backlink. The problem is that you really don’t know what websites you’re going to and often they’re just those low-level ones. You end up throwing away money.

Within the SEO world they have terms for these operators. “Black Hats”. These are SEO companies that try to game the system with backlinks and other tactics in relatively shady ways. Google has cracked down a lot on them. Conversely, there are “White Hat” companies in this game, but just remember nothing is free and they charge huge fees.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying purchasing backlinks is a bad idea. Generally it isn’t effective but it can be in the right situation. For example, locally we have Frederick dot com. Notice I didn’t backlink them because they’re a paid service and I’m not giving them free publicity. They don’t give away their service so all’s fair in love and war. But they are a level or two up from the randos. They’re a local ad source and have decent traffic. Getting your backlink on their site isn’t a bad idea. But they want a lot of money for it, and they do have some drawbacks to be aware of.

What kind of drawbacks? They do their backlinks in a list of local businesses under categories. That’s alright, but far too often you’ll be grouped with competitors. So with Francis’ Keys, for example, they have a category for locksmiths. Unfortunately there are already several other local locksmiths who’ve paid them to be there. While that’s OK, it limits your ability to stand out from the crowd. So in my opinion, I’m not opposed to having a backlink there, but I wouldn’t do it for the price they want. It’s too expensive for the type of exposure they’re giving you. These are the decisions you face in these cases.

So, if a listing like Frederick dot com is OK but not the best, what is the better option? Old fashioned shoe leather and sales work ultimately combined with strategic blogging. You want to make connections with other businesses in your area that compliment what you do. You can do it with ones that don’t compliment you as well but it’s far less effective. Using their blog is the key to success. What you want to do is gain their permission to write a guest blog article on their website with backlinks to your site. They might want a few bucks or more for it, or possibly you can offer them something in exchange, like discounted service or placement on your blog as some examples.

Keep in mind, as I just said, nothing is or should be free. In this case of this blog, I've had attempts from outside companies wanting access. A few years back a rather large corporation out of Washington, DC contacted me wanting a blog post. Apparently, they were an IT SEO company repping a large cell phone tower company and wanted a post and backlink for some tower project in the area. There excuse was "You probably would want your customers to know about this". What were they offering? Zip, nada, nothing. No payments, no reciprocal backlinks. I politely declined their polite offer. Don't give away your blog like that, especially to a company with the means to pay for it.

Let me give you an example of how this would really work. Let’s take Francis’ Keys. Getting a backlink on the blog of a local auto dealership or maybe a big-time repair shop would be very valuable. But if the backlink was on “Joey’s Bag ‘O Donuts Cafe”? Not that valuable and Google has algorithms to make that so. You want your backlink on sites that are related to what you do. So, as you can see, this is not easy.

Now you might suggest putting your backlink on Facebook or possibly Reddit. Yeah, you can do that, but these fall under the lower quality areas and most likely won’t go anywhere or at best get a couple of one-time clicks. Reddit is especially low quality at this stage of the game. The social media platforms are useful no question, but they're also limited to the number of followers you have in most cases.

So that’s the deal with backlinks. It’s obviously a very powerful tool in your arsenal for growing web presence and driving business. Unfortunately it’s not easy to get and there’s certainly a lot of competition out there. You have to make sensible choices and above all realize there’s no silver bullet and often you can waste a lot of money chasing things that aren’t attainable.