The most important thing to remember about online SEO efforts is that quality wins over quantity. As a starter, you can begin by getting your online store or official website listed in the reputable directories and then slowly embark on building high quality incoming links from relevant sites with a high authority ranking.
By doing this, you can build your off-page links in a natural manner acceptable to Google and thereby improve your search engine ranking. This will definitely take time, dedicated effort and patience, but it does pay off in the longer term.
The best strategy follows the 80/20 rule: devote effort towards identifying and securing 20% of links which will offer 80% of the results you want to see. Your efforts in acquiring 1000 links drawn from sites with low PageRank and credibility will not serve as well as if you were to devote yourself to getting a handful of backlinks from high authority related sites with a high PageRank.
Link exchanging and buying is a definite no-go zone if you’re looking to improve your linking strategy. Don’t just exchange links with a person because they asked you to, and don’t just ask for backlinks from sites that have little to do with your own site’s content and core competencies.
Getting High Quality Links
Obtaining the kind of links that could have a huge positive impact on your business can be very difficult, especially for small businesses that don’t have in their budgets the kind of investment it takes to gain professional assistance.
In the absence of money, you have just one other tool in your arsenal: good, high quality, shareable content. You must give those high ranking sites a good reason to be interested in linking back to your site. These sites won’t just offer up links because you’re selling something online and you asked nicely.
That almost-worn out maxim remains true: Content is King. High quality content will attract high quality links. Recently, Google published a whitepaper stating they have patented a Knowledge Based ranking factor which will examine site content to determine the level of factual content. While it is not in use and may never be implemented, it’s worth consideration that Google would go into such lengths to ensure users are fed with factual and high quality content.
There’s no shortcut to off-page SEO through link-building. You must be ready to put in the work – offer high quality content and build links naturally from high quality sources only.
