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. Many “SEO experts” have become rich from selling virtually worthless backlinks.

These guys argue that Google loves external links to a website. That the more incoming links you have to your website, the higher it will be ranked in search results. This was after all how Google started off - the researchers developed a ground breaking way to rank search results in terms of backlinks, right?

Yes and no. Yes, Google likes links. The more indeed the merrier. But Google is a little bit more clever than this. Setting up 10 000 pages with nothing else than links back to your website will most likely not get you anywhere with Google.

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.

But what is a quality backlink then? Why would one link be given a higher value than another link? The answer is simple: relevance. It’s not really such a difficult concept to explain. Let’s say you have a website about building model aeroplanes and down the road is another guys with the same type of website. Now you get the local butcher to link to your website from his, while the other guy manages to get a link from a well-known, highly regarded website about hobbies. Who do you think Google should list at the top?

Suppose further that you pick up that Google is listing his website above yours in search results, so you make a deal with all the other butchers in town, as well as the supermarkets and the furniture removal guys to 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.

How do you get backlinks from such important, relevant websites though? If your website content is really of a high standard, you could contact well know websites in that category and ask them for backlinks. This is hard work, but can be very effective.

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.