SEO Backlinks; Help or Hurt Your Site?

• by Dan Bailey

I’ve noticed more and more chatter recently surrounding backlinks; namely, clients requesting SEO backlinks to their websites. To back up, of course a decade ago the name of the game was ‘the more backlinks, the better for SEO.’ And so SEOs began buying what turned out to be spammy, or blackhat, backlinks in time. Which in turn caused search engine penalties to their websites. Today it’s recognized that high-quality, relevant industry backlinks can really help your website optimization results (even if not a lot). But it’s a challenge to discern good sources, and then obtain them.

First of all, it’s important to not let the tail wag the dog here – SEO strategy must be valued. And SEO is more than just backlinks. And there may be errors or more fundamental SEO issues that need addressing before backlinks.

Also, there’s a tendency to forget that you can achieve your own backlinks. A good SEO can guide and help you, but there are sources at your disposal for backlinks. Such as social media posts and shares, vendor and partner sites, and PR. Social media and PR are good because they can achieve more than one goal; integrated with SEO strategy, they can help optimization as well as their own objectives.

A lot of times, there is the desire to achieve backlinks from prominent publications. However, in order to get organic (non-advertising) content placed in those pubs (with links) in the first place, criteria must be met. And this is where PR comes in. A good PR-meets-SEO provider strategy can generate the right content, and get it placed, and achieve backlinks.

So yes, backlinks can be achieved and help SEO today, but all these considerations must go into the planning. Luckily, I enjoy working with PR to achieve that.

Thanks for reading, Jake Aull, Zen Fires