With the whirlwind of changes at Google, many businesses are confused about how to boost their site’s rankings without being penalized. Yes, Google has changed its algorithm (scoring system for how it ranks websites in their search results). But, the truth is that Google is always changing its scoring system. We only hear about the major updates. No matter what changes Google implements, one thing it has never, and probably will never, tolerate is using spammy, paid backlinks to boost a site’s rankings. This is actually good news for most businesses. If you play by the rules, you’ll dominate your competition.

We want to lay out our recommendations on how to use backlinks to boost your business through dominating the SERPs and driving organic traffic to your website.

Example of strong incoming backlinks

The Truth About Backlinks

In the old days, simply purchasing large batches of back links and pointing them to your site’s home page would get you ranked on page one quickly.

Google caught up with the schemes and began penalizing those companies that attempted to game the system.

Unfortunately, most SEO firms threw the baby out with the bathwater. They railed against all back-linking strategies, fearful that they’d be on the business-end of a Google-slap.

Bad Back Links Are Spam

If you can buy several thousand links for a few dollars, you can be sure that they’re coming from spam sites. Utilizing these links will give your company a momentary boost in the search rankings.

However, Google will catch up and penalize your site.

Should You Avoid Back Links for Your Business Site?

No. You just have to get the right kind of links. The good news is that if you back link properly, your site will rank high and stay high, dominating your market.

The bad news is that this process is time-consuming, and will require a real effort in content marketing. Quality back linking involves writing articles, making videos, sharing content to social media, cooperating with other businesses through guest postings, and overall, building a ton of content that is interesting and useful to your customers.

• It is difficult, time consuming and requires a specific skill set to do so. Therefore, most of the fly-by-night SEO firms want nothing to do with it.

• However, content marketing, and back-links generated from quality content will boost your search rankings, and help convert traffic into leads.

Remember that SEO needs to be one part of an overall content strategy and that joining your social and SEO/ SEM teams under your content team, will allow for you to find efficiencies and lower CAC and CPL in your business. We frequently see paid cost drop, while organic growth occurs which is ideal for any start-up or emerging business.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO