Getting Backlinks To Your Website Is Now Really Easy

Listen to the Robert Somerville Interview with the tons of other podcast interviews that you can find on this site.

David: I’m keen to get your idea of what you’d say is the biggest factor in ranking. I know it’s always hard to say one single thing is the biggest. There is on page, there is off page…

Bob: Back links. Back links are the sledgehammer of SEO (search engine optimization strategies). You can rank for anything if you’ve got enough back links. However, Google is of course, over time, making it harder and harder for people to get easy back links. I learned this as I was selling a website on flippa. A lot of the leverage strategies we had in the past, reciprocal linking, buying back links, these strategies are losing favour in Google and therefore they’re no longer available to us. They’re not considered to be linking strategies that meet their terms and conditions. So it gets harder and harder.

They’re after quality relevance over the longer term. I found this out through the wordpress direct review. My personal view is that you still need to focus on your back link building. What you want to be doing is closing the loop, making sure that everything is consistent. Let’s say you want to rank for a particular keyword, then it’s in your interests that that keyword is in the url or the domain name or the page that you’re trying to get ranked for that keyword. It’s in the title, it’s in the description, and the anchor text of the link is consistent with that keyword so that you’ve actually got internal consistency in the eyes of Google.

It’s knowing what you’re doing to maximize the probability that the spiders will give you a high relevance score for that keyword and therefore increase your authority in the SERTs.

David: I think that makes perfect sense with the off page and on page. You mentioned some of the things as far as the on page. Obviously the single biggest ranking factor you were saying was the back links. Then it is important to close the loop. For your on page, what do you see as the key things? You talked a little bit about the title. Are there other areas you think, yes, these are the single biggest on page factors?

Bob: The single biggest on page factor is the keyword’s preferably in the domain, but if it’s not in the domain, it’s at least in the url. That’s the single biggest on page factor. The next biggest on page factor is that the keyword’s in the title. Those two alone, are by far and away the two biggest on page factors.

David: The other thing as well, clearly getting links is the biggest factor for getting a website ranked. It’s important, I think, to build up a variety of links because that’s what happens naturally and you don’t necessarily want to go for one particular method. I’m interested to ask, if you had to pick one method for building links, and only one method, and I’m not suggesting that people should only do this, but I’m interested to know where you think the best biggest bang for your buck is on getting links?

Bob: Article submissions. It’s a no brainer.

David: With the article submissions: to a particular site? Ezine is the granddaddy.

Bob: What I always do, I treat EzineArticles very carefully because they have a human moderation process. So if I’m having an article written, I’ll create a variation of that article which I’ll only submit manually to EzineArticles. Having then got through their approval process because that can take, as you’re probably aware, anywhere up to a week or ten days, once that has been accepted and is live on the EzineArticles domain, I will then submit to the other article directories using an automated service.

But I won’t do that using duplicate content, I’ll attempt to spin that, to create sufficiently unique variations. So each article submission is at least 30% unique.

Start submitting articles, and your website will soon have a very acceptable number of links.