Inorganic vs. Organic Backlinking Strategies

The backlink within the practice of SEO is an ongoing topic of conversation for marketing, sales, delivery and reporting of SEO services. Even in a post Penguin world, SEO professionals are still asking questions such as:

What’s the best way to build backlinks that will have a positive long-term impact on a web presence?
Is quantity better than quality?
Should I buy backlinks?
How do I protect a web presence from future Google algorithm changes?
How do I know how many organic backlinks versus inorganic backlinks my web presence has?
In our post Penguin world, the right and wrong approaches to backlinking strategies should be clear, yet I continue to hear SEOs talk about how backlinking is dead, where the best place is to buy backlinks, and whether backlinking even matters anymore.

The fact is, the backlink is and will continue to be a fundamental variable in organic search algorithms and organic search strategies. Backlinks matter. Period. The only question you need to ask yourself is: Is this an organic backlink or an inorganic backlink?

SEO and backlinks on the web can't exist without each other. It is worth getting back to the backlink basics and considering the origins of SEO and backlinking to understand the importance and reliance they have on each other.

SEO Strategies & Backlinking Strategies

An SEO strategy is about one thing: being found organically by your customers and prospects for highly converting keywords; keywords that are relevant to your audience. Relevance of content is earned when diversified, relevant content sources with authority and influence reference your content. Or, in other words, link to it.

A backlinking strategy is simply about these three concepts:

Relevance: Is this link coming from a relevant source that further supports the relevance of my content?
Authority and Influence: Was the source of this link written by an authoritative, influential person or business?
Diversity: By adding this link to my web presence am I diversifying and adding value to my digital footprint?
Every backlink you build should pass the RAID test.

If you're able to answer yes to these three questions, then you likely have an organic backlink that is going to positively impact your organic search visibility.

If you can't answer yes to these three questions, then you have an inorganic backlink that will have no impact on organic search results and may even penalize your web presence at some point in the future.



The Origins of the Backlink Pre-Search Engines

In the academic world, when content is published in the form of a thesis there are citations within the content that point to other relevant content from authoritative sources that support the content, thus making it more relevant to the reader. Sounds like a backlink.

Google's origins are academic in nature, having started as a research project at Stanford University. Larry Page was focused on, “the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).”

The research project then went on, “to convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page.” The output was, “for a given URL … a list of backlinks ranked by importance” or relevance.

That was 1996. Seventeen years later, relevancy is still at the core of Google's organic search algorithm, especially when it comes down to backlinks.

How Do You Get Relevant, Authoritative, Influential & Diversified Backlinks?

Roll up your sleeves and get to work. The really great organic backlinks that are going to add long-term value to your web presence, digital footprint and organic search positions and conversions won't happen overnight by buying or trading them, or submitting to directories. Remember, inorganic backlinks don't pass the RAID test.

Building organic backlinks takes a lot of heavy lifting in an approach called Optimized Content Marketing. Publishing fresh, relevant, optimized content on a continuous basis through industry blog sites, press releases, white papers and case studies that demonstrate knowledge and thought leadership, plus socializing the content through your social networks will create a strong inventory of organic backlinks over time.

This long-term approach to SEO will also protect you from any future Google algorithm changes and will make it extremely difficult for your competitors to outrank you.

Reporting Data for Organic vs. Inorganic Backlinks

Great SEO services and results start with great SEO data. Accurate, timely SEO data is required in order to make great decisions about what to do next to a web presence in order to make improvements for organic search.

Be wary of SEO backlink data sources that include inorganic backlink data in their data sets. It is irrelevant to report on backlinks that are inorganic and have no impact on organic search. Reporting on a growing backlink count over time when those backlinks are inorganic is useless and will create unrealistic expectations with your clients.

Summary

Backlinking strategies within an SEO strategy are often overcomplicated. It doesn't have to be this way. Practice an optimized content marketing strategy and test each backlink with the RAID test and your web presence will excel over the long term in Google.

Source:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241724/Inorganic-vs.-Organic-Backlinking-Strategies-Getting-Back-to-Basics

4 Things New Site Owners Need to Understand about SEO

There are four key points that I really try to hammer home and keep coming back to throughout the day. These four things aren’t technically action items but more of a mentality a new site owner needs to have when they are ready to start their own SEO campaign.

1. SEO is Long Term

If you need to drive 1,000 visitors to your site right now, then you are going to be sorely disappointed in SEO. SEO is a long term process that builds on itself and gains momentum with time—and time isn’t something you can force along, no matter how much on or offsite SEO work you do.

What you do today might not have a real tangible impact on your website for a few months, but chances are if you did it right you’ll be benefiting from that SEO action item for years down the road.

For instance, part of any good SEO campaign is content marketing and blogging. I’ve been writing in my company blog for over a year, along with a variety of other SEO sites including Search Engine Journal. My company blog publishes at least two posts a day Monday to Friday—that’s a lot of content!

Plenty of these posts get some social love, while others barely make a blip, but each one of those posts contributes to the overall impact of my SEO campaign. Just recently, I noticed that one of those blogs had been cited in a New York Times article; talk about a great link! I know that a year ago I never would have been found by a New York Times blogger, but because I embraced the fact that SEO is long term and that it requires patience, consistency, and dedication, my efforts paid off!

I know that most new site owners don’t want to wait six months or a year to see the value of their SEO campaign, but if you want to do SEO right, it’s going to take time.

2. Always Put Your Visitors before the Search Engines

I feel like a lot fewer sites would get in trouble with search engine algorithm updates if they stopped worrying so much about the search engine algorithm. I realize that sounds kind of backwards, but in my experience, as long as you put your human visitors first in everything that you do for SEO, chances are it’s the kind of things the search engines are looking for.

Is that piece of content designed to actually inform and educate your readers or are you just looking to rank? Will this link send a few targeted visitors your way or just add one more link to your backlink portfolio? Stop chasing the algorithm and focus on doing things that will help you connect with your target audience!

When you put the search engines before your visitors that’s usually when sites start investing in techniques that are more likely to get them in trouble down the road.

3. There is No Secret to SEO Success

You want to know what the secret to SEO success is? Just doing it and making sure you do it right. There is no “trick” to catapult your website to the top (and actually stay there long term), and any SEO firm or consultant that tries to sell you otherwise is not the kind of SEO firm you want to trust your website to.

A few months ago several of my SEO clients got the same email from another SEO consultant named “Bob” that looked something like this:

“Did you know your website isn’t ranking in the top ten for any of your keywords? And you only have 72 back links? With my help I can get your website to the front page of Google in only 2 months time! I’ve worked out the secret to SEO success and want to help your site.”

First off, how does “Bob” know what keywords my clients are targeting as part of their SEO? (And plenty of them were in the top 10 for the record!) And secondly, where is Bob pulling is data about my client’s link profile? I’m fairly sure he doesn’t have access to their Google Webmaster Tools Account which tells me my clients actually have closer to 7,000 backlinks … but many new site owners that doesn’t understand or don’t know this information about their own site might fall for such a line simply because they don’t know.

4. Link Building is forever

New site owners often ask me question like “Well, how long should I do link building?” or “How many links will I take to get where I want my SEO to be?”. There is no definite answer to either of those questions. Link building is forever. You might hit a certain benchmark that you set to measure your own SEO success but that doesn’t mean you get to ride off into the sunset on the back of your previous activities.

Every day you don’t bother with link building is another day your competition does and they get one step closer to unseating you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites competing for the top spot in the SERPs—just because you reach it that doesn’t mean it’s yours forever. I’ve seen too many sites pull way back on their link building when they thought they had a ranking on lock down and their site just dropped through the SERPs over time.

Like I mentioned before, these aren’t really action items that you can take and implement today—but they are four critical ways of looking at and thinking about SEO that I feel more new site owners need to understand. If you can better wrap your head around what SEO really is, what it really

Source: SEJ

Why Social Media is So Important

Social media has impacted our world and our culture in a major way over the last couple of years in creative ways that many of us never could have imagined before these sites were launched. Even MySpace back in its infancy seemed like such an advanced program, it’s hard to imagine now how we ever lived without the use of social media. Now, things like learning how to get more Facebook likes and how to increase Twitter followers are popular searches on Google. Isn’t it crazy how social media has impacted our culture and given us fresh ways to communicate with each other?

Remember back when you had to actually pick up the phone and call someone if you wanted to talk to them? That or you had to get up and go see them in person; those were you two options, you could go see the person live, or you could call them on the phone, there was no text messaging or Facebook or Twitter to reach out on. Now, we barely use our mobile phones to communicate via the “phone”, no, we now use out mobile smartphones to log into our social media accounts wherever we are, whether it’s at the airport, the restaurant, the sports game, sometimes we do it even when we are at work. It’s almost like there is a “need” for us to get onto our social media accounts and constantly update our friends of new things that are going on.

Of course there are those that probably spend way too much time on Facebook and Twitter, but for a lot of us, we use these sites for good causes. It truly is a great way that we can reach out to friends and families, and it’s given people an awesome way that they can always be up-to-date. Can you even imagine how many relationships have kicked off because of social media? Long distance relationships used to be a laughingstock for those that attempted them, but now with things like Instagram, and Skype, it’s opened the door to all kinds of new possibilities, and it has made our lives a whole lot easier.

Social media has impacted our culture in ways that none of us were prepared or ready for, and it’s something that our ancestors never could have seen coming. It’s crazy to think how far it has advanced in the few years we’ve had it, leaving us to wonder just how far it will take us in the future.

About Author:-Thomas Konal is blogger works for leading web design and digital marketing company called DesignBuddy’s, That have superior experience and capabilities to design creative and innovative projects.