High Quality Backlinks Are Never Created. They Are Earned!

Hello friends! How are you all? Today I met one of my close friends who just joined a digital marketing agency in Mumbai, having offices in US, UK and Australia. He has been appointed as an SEO associate there. Wow, that’s so cool, isn’t it?

Out of curiosity I asked him –

Hey Arnav, I’m so happy that you joined this agency. But I’m curious to know – what do you do as an SEO associate there? What does a typical day in your office look like? His answer to this question blew me away! It frankly turned me off.

Here is what he replied –

The typical day at the office starts at 11am. My quotidian responsibilities include submitting clients’ articles to free article directories, leaving comments on do follow blogs, spinning a dull article at least 5 times and then sharing those published articles through a bunch of fake social media profiles!

Here’s the problem –

We used to call this “SEO” almost a decade ago! SEO agencies, especially in a fledgling digital market like India need to understand this – The entire SEO game has changed. Today, quality is far more important than just the numbers. And above all, quality backlinks are never created. They are earned. Period. Try digging into the backlink profile of any authority in your niche: Any authoritative and highly successful website that may be known to you. Here’s a common pattern that you’ll observe –

1. Diversity of anchor text
2. Little to absolutely no links from link directories and article directories
3. Most important thing that you’ll notice – links from many solid and authoritative websites.

No wonder, these high-quality backlinks are rarely made. These are in fact, earned by developing high quality and useful content. Content that spellbinds the readers and make them say –

Awwwww…This is mind-blowing. How beautiful! How neat! Let me bookmark this! Let me share this with my followers! Let me link it in my next blog post!

For example – Whenever I read new posts published by Neil Patel on his flagship quicksprout.com, I have exactly the same feelings. Each post written by him is so useful, detailed, neat and popping with eye candy graphics that it makes everyone reading it to love it, share it or link to it.

Amit Aggarwal of lanbol.org is yet another example. His posts are so unique, detailed, rich with vivid illustrations and examples that it makes everyone reading it fall in love with his website.

My own examples: How I ‘earned’ some of the great high-quality backlinks!

I’m not a full-time blogger yet. And that’s why at the time of writing this post, Budding Geek has only 75 published posts. With just 75 published posts, the blog still manages to get 400 unique visits a day. My first blog Digital Camera Photography taught me many practical things about blogging and SEO. I have seen many ups and downs working with my first blog. I even got hit by the nasty penguin update, and it crippled my site – totally!

Carrying on this long experience, right from the day one of launching Budding Geek, I adopted a baby-care approach to build my blog: Focusing on quality, rather than quantity. Refraining from creating links, rather, earning them by publishing high quality content and making guest contributions on the top blogs/websites in the industry.

Doing useful and engaging guest posts has earned me backlinks from a few good and authoritative websites. ProBlogger and Social Media Today being the greatest two of them!

Websites of a few good universities and colleges have also linked to my ever-green post on Image Plagiarism. The Visual Arts Library of London Metropolitan University being one of them.

And did I mention how one of my recent posts got viral with 20000 unique visits in just a day!

All this has been possible through hours of dedicated hard work that I’ve put into creating my posts.

Conclusion: It all starts with great content!

Great content is the foundation of solid SEO. While technical SEO is essential to make a site search engine friendly, any on-page/off-page SEO effort is a waste of time if the content is useless, dull and boring! This is my strong opinion.

What’s your approach?

What’s your approach to SEO? Creating links or earning links? Do you also believe that good content forms the foundation of any solid SEO strategy? Drop your thoughts in the comments below…