Internet Marketing Business Strategies

It seems like at least once a year, a debate rages over the real value of backlinks. The problem with this debate is that it often isn’t based within a specific paradigm. During your link building process, it is important to determine exactly why you are building backlinks.

Why Are You Building Backlinks?

This may sound like a stupid question, because the ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website. However, it deserves a second look. Here is a closer look at two of the most common paradigms for building and measuring the value of backlinks.

1. Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings

The main reason why most people build backlinks is to improve their rankings in the major search engines.

In that case, the question to ask is, “Which links will be the most valuable?”

The problem is that in order to determine the value of backlinks, you have to know how search engines assign value to those links. The problem is, it is impossible to know exactly how this happens because it is a closely guarded secret. A lot of the details have been worked out through reverse engineering of the rankings, but it is still only speculation.

If your goal is to increase your search engine rankings, then the links which have value for you are the ones that have value for the search engines. To make things even more complex, you can find a variety of different linking strategies to make every link even more valuable than it is by itself.

For example, link wheels and link pyramids are designed so that you can use a combination of lower valued backlinks and end up with each link having more total power.

The general consensus is that the links which carry the most value are the ones with the most “credibility”. Unfortunately, this is hard to define. People have proven that you can use blog comments, forum profiles, in-text links, article marketing, and a variety of other tactics to boost SERP ratings, however it is difficult to see exactly what the value of any individual link is. This is because you normally don’t build backlinks one link at a time.

2. Boosting Total Traffic

Another way to look at the value of your backlinks is how much traffic the links drive by themselves. With this paradigm you don’t really care about the search engine rankings because you are trying to generate traffic directly. Within this paradigm, the links with the highest value tend to be based upon your niche. At the same time, there are a few sources of backlinks that are consistently highly valued. For example, submitting guest blog posts to other blogs is a great way to generate traffic directly from your bank links While a single guest post won’t be valuable in terms of your search engine rankings, they can still drive hundreds or thousands of people to your website.

In the end, you can only define the value of backlinks by first defining what you want to gain from them. The two primary paradigms are backlinks to boost your search engine rankings and backlinks to directly boost your total incoming traffic.

Since each niche is different, this may take a little time for you to identify the best sources, but once you do, it is important to consistently monitor the value of backlinks to your site and see how they fit into your specific paradigm.