Your business needs online visibility to be profitable in the digital world. And since search engines, like Google, are the biggest drivers of online traffic (and sources of exposure), you need to impress them to get such visibility.
Once you manage to “impress” the search engines with your web presence, they are more likely to rank you higher.
But how do you do that?
Through a search engine optimization or SEO online marketing strategy.
Search engines have certain ranking factors to determine how “deserving” a website is torank higher.
SEO online marketing techniques are designed to ensure that your website is in line with the latest search engine ranking factors.
Once a website satisfies all these ranking factors, it is more likely to “impress” the search engine, gain its trust, and have a better chance of appearing among the top search results.
And you know what happens when a website ranks higher.
It gets more traffic, more exposure, and eventually more leads or sales for the business it represents.
This is the best thing that can happen to an online business.
High-quality backlinks are among the top ranking factors that search engines use to determine a website’s worth. Therefore, link-building is one of the most popular SEO online marketing techniques.
Backlinks are links that are posted on other websites on the internet that link back to your website.
Google and other search engines prioritize backlinks so much because backlinks vouch for a website’s credibility.
Imagine if your website gets lots of links from other well-reputed websites. Won’t that make your website look good?
It would.
That’s what Google thinks too.
Therefore, reliable SEO internet marketing services strive to acquire links from high-authority websites so your website can also be among one of the reputable ones and climb higher.
However, nothing good comes easy. And the same is true for high-quality link building.
Getting links from high-authority websites is resource-intensive and time-consuming. You have to go through an extensive outreach process, create content, and then wait.
And most people don’t have the patience for that. So, they look for “quicker” alternatives.
Consequently,some business owners fall victim to the black hat (illegitimate) SEO practices of certain “affordable” SEOs and jump at the opportunity to get hundreds of links within minutes.
But one thing you should know about the digital world is: most shortcuts aren’t shortcuts to success. They are shortcuts to your online loss.
Such illegitimate link acquisition tactics end up doing more damage than good for their website.
How?
Black hat SEOs deploy robotic link-building strategies that get your website toxic links from link farms, private blog networks, and other shady, spammy websites.
Despite being a robot, Google takes a very human approach and judges a website’s “character” by the “people” it hangs out with.
In other words, if Google sees that a website has a lot of links coming from such shady, useless websites, it automatically assumes that this website would be just like them.
As a result, it does not favor such a website so much when deciding its rank.
No one wants to take something they think is shady and unreliable to people they value the most, right?
Similarly, Google also takes severe action against toxic-link-laden websites to ensure that they never reach its esteemed users.
You can avoid suffering such severe consequences of toxic, bot-created links by opting for handcrafted backlinks.
But what are the “severe” consequences of toxic links?
More importantly, how can you acquirehandcrafted links for your website?
Landau Consulting, an NJ SEO consulting company, answers these questions and more in this infographic. Check it out to learn more about handcrafted backlinks, their benefits, and how you can get them.