Inbound links, incoming links or just backlinks, are important in SEO and no questions asked. Webmasters and web owners have been struggling to get as much backlinks as they can to increase their websites' presence on the web. However, despite there is no argument that can describe backlink-hunting as not important, there is good reasons why you shouldn't stress them out too much.
Links can be either good or bad, and thinking too much about them won't make your campaign any better. The reason is simple: backlinks were never meant to be the origin point of a marketing campaign, but rather a result of (or even reward for) those efforts.
The number of backlinks do contribute to how competitive you are in the search results against specific keywords. But backlinks aren't the thing that legitimately represent people's choice.
Your users come first, and to make your campaign work, you must first make them satisfied. Here both user experience and customer experience matter.
If you take the other way around, the way where backlinks become your primary goal, the experience you want to give to your viewers will have a lesser priority. During this time, you've shifted your focus away from your customers to only yourself. Your viewers won't like you, and they'll see this as a lack of sincerity and professionalism. And in a long term, both search engines and your influencers won't like you in either.
The reason is the harder you work toward gaining followed links, the further away you get from natural link acquisition. The more your try to get more backlinks, the more you forget that backlinks on the web means "citations".
The result is your site won't be able to give your viewers any benefit. Traffic and links are friends with benefits. In short, if you can't benefit the crowd, your site's existence isn't necessary for the community or your niche.
Value The Experience, The Rest Comes Later
Using links, web users can go from one niche to the next, from the normal to even the most bizarre. From the most relevant to the most irrelevant. The web is complicated, and it should be because it holds a lot of information.
The World Wide Web has so many links; they're used to connect pieces of information that are scattered throughout the web. They're used as readers' reference about something they see on the web. Backlinks that act like citations, are meant to provide more information.
Backlinks are also seen as votes. A vote here is like a badge, or a token of gratitude; a mean for your viewers to show respect to you because you deserve it.
So if you think too much about backlinks, what comes to your mind when creating a content will be:
- "What is the best website to put my backlinks?"
- "Which high-quality websites should I prioritize?"
- "How many words should my post be? How many keywords should there be?"
- "How do I create a clickbait title so people will like it?">/li>
- "How should my anchor links be?"
- Etc..
Here we can conclude how the mind works. The more you think about something, the more your brain is occupied by it. The more you stress about backlinks, the more you'll break user experience. User experience here is the flow that grades people's respect when they see you. Web surfers like a great experience on the web, and their concern is also search engines'.
Do Things Right: Backlinks Will Come
SEO is all about tips and tricks with the main goal to make search engines rank a website higher. But as people that use SEO, tricking search engines' ever-evolving and highly complex algorithm won't get you far. Once search engines found out what you did was wrong, all the strategy you've done will be taken aside.
Just like what Matt Cutts from Google said:
Search engines' penalty is often seen as a "horror" to many webmasters and web owners. So it's best for you to follow their guidelines if you want to continuously thrive on search engines' results pages.
So if backlinks shouldn't be the first that come to your mind, what should?
As for the greater goods, webmasters and web owners are advised to share contents that help their viewers improve their lives, expand their way of thoughts, their thinking, and giving them answers about what's happening around them based on your niche. Stop looking at the gap and weaknesses you can exploit. Ranking may come important to you, but user value; their satisfaction and quality experience come far greater.
What this means is that inside your marketing strategy, you should first develop and market content for the benefit of and value to your readers, not for the possible backlinks. Backlinks will come, and they'll come quickly without you even asking them to come, if you can create the compelling post that do benefit your viewers that is.
Read more: The Reasons Why Your Backlinks Aren't Helping Your Search Engine Rank