High Quality Back Links – Are You Making This Mistake?

Hey there!

It’s been awhile since my last blog post, so here we are!

I want to discuss a very common SEO mistake that people tend to make (I made this too!).

OK, here we goo…

The fool proof way to improve your search engine rankings is to get high quality back links to your website. I’m sure you know this already (or at least, I hope so!).

-A high quality back link is basically a link to your website from another website that is also about the same topic of your website.

However, it’s very easy to misinterpret whether or not the content on each website is the same or related. I know that probably doesn’t make sense, so let me put it another way and also give you some examples.

Search engines are dumb.

What you or I can easily categorize as being related in topic, the search engines cannot. They base everything off keywords, and if the keyword is not on the exact page that links to your website (for the keyword you are trying to rank for), it does you no good. Let’s work off an example to make this clearer.

Let’s say I give you two words: carpentry and hammer and asked you if they are related, you would say yes because a carpenter uses a hammer on a daily basis.

Here’s an even better example.

Words: webmaster & web hosting

If you know anything about websites, you would say the two terms are related because all webmasters need web hosting in order to show their websites to the world…

However, since search engines can’t think (at least not yet) or have learning experiences, they are unable to make this connection.

In other words, if you get a link on a page about being a webmaster to your web hosting site, in the eyes of the search engines it does not count as a high quality link UNLESS the words web hosting are in content somewhere else on the page about being a webmaster.

(Yes, I speak from experience here I actually made that mistake with my web hosting company years ago and ended up burning thousands on paid links, but that’s another story)

Now, I’m not saying it isn’t worth trying to get a link from a webmaster website if you have a web hosting website – in fact, I’ve had a lot of success turning that traffic into buyers…

However, from an SEO standpoint, it does not count as a high quality link. So strictly speaking SEO here, if I wanted a high quality link to my web hosting sites, I need to comment somewhere on a website or page that is specifically about web hosting.

Make sense?

Learn it!

-Dan Brock

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