What is a backlink strategy? This is simply a description of the strategy a website owner follows to get other websites to link back to his website. The popular misconception is that as far as this goes the more the better. There are countless SEO ‘experts’ running around charging customers huge sums of money to get thousands of links back to their websites.

The theory goes like this: Google likes links. Google was built on the premise that a website with more links to it must be an important site, it must be an authority otherwise all those other websites would not be linking to it. So getting more and more links is good, right?

Right and wrong. Google is not quite that stupid to only take a look at the number of incoming links to a website to decide whether it will be ranked on the first page of search results or the last. Google does not have such a simplistic view. It does not rate all links as equal. Otherwise it would have been quite easy to set up thousands of pages with backlinks to your own website and thereby get to the top of Google search results very quickly.

The truth is that Google has a way to decide which links will count heavily towards a site’s ranking in search results and which links can basically be discarded. If you think about it, you will soon realize it makes a lot of sense.

How does Google do this? The answer once again makes a lot of sense. Suppose you had a website about dogs. Everything about dogs, what they like, what they don’t like, what to feed them and when. So you get the local vet to link to your site from his, and you link back to him. Down the road is another guy also with a website about dogs. His articles about dogs are so good that he gets the American Dog Owner’s Association to link back to his website. Which website do you think Google would list first in search results? Why?

Suppose further that you notice his site is listed above yours, so you buy links from all the shops in town back to your website. All of them create special pages with no other content but the link to your website.

What do you think will happen? The correct answer is: nothing. Google will still rank the other guy on top, because the one link to his website is a) from an authoritative website that may have thousands of other websites linking to them and b) the content of his website is related to the content on that other website.

To get quality backlinks to your site is not easy. That is why so many people still fall for the “10 000 quality links” trick. You might have to write to 50 website owners and ask them to look at your website content to get one good backlink in the end. Should it be from a authoritative website that one link might make a big difference though.

And if the articles are really good, they will be picked up by other websites and you could end up with a lot of quality links back to your site. This process is known as article marketing.  This makes for a much better backlink strategy than simply buying thousands of useless links.