A dose of backlink reality

The purpose behind creating backlinks is to drive traffic to your content, whether that may be an article, website, sales page or whatever. The traffic you attract needs to be both good quality, in that is targeted as relevant and high quantity in that you're pulling in enough volume to achieve your goals. So far so good, we know this.

The next stage in working to achieve this is also reasonably well understood and documented by now. Essentially you need to work to build links to your content. There are plenty of ways of going about this and a host of general content sites you can easily submit content to in order to create your backlinks. Have a look at the links on this page for a start. Many are revenue sharing sites so if you make your backlinking content good it can even earn some small returns for you. In addition niche specfic backlinks on relevant blogs, forums etc need creating as this is where you'll find your highly relevant traffic. If you've any experience of doing this you'll know it all takes time. Sure there are ways of working smarter, even tools to automate some of the graft but I'm a believer that automation often produces low quality and often counter productive results.

So, after the work of creating your content you are only half way there, you need to work even harder to promote it and build those backlinks! How hard can actually be a sobering realisation. The number and quality of backlinks needed will obvioulsy depend on the traffic required and the competition existing for the keywords and terms being targeted. However I'm willing to bet many backlink builders never go nearly far enough with their efforts!

Check out this page of keyword ideas on Seekyt. A useful resource in itself they are maintaining a list of low competition, high paying keywords as a resource for their writers. The sobering part is how they rank the difficulty of achieving a number 1 ranking on Google for each term. Only the easiest terms (0-2 on their 0-10 scale) may require less than 100 'in-context' backlinks to successfuly promote a 'high quality and properly optimized' article.

Now success can be achieved without making number 1 on Google, but you'll probably need to not be too far off. Two things to note. Any old backlink will not do, they need to be 'in-context' backlinks as anchor text within unique relevant articles. These take time and effort to create. Secondly, they will only pay dividends if your target link is itself high quality and properly optimized.

What does it boil down to? Backlinking aint easy baby! Sure it is pretty easy to understand as a concept and fairly straightforward to do as a task. However the gist of the Seekyt keyword ideas is that it will be hard graft to build the quantity and quality needed to pull in serious traffic. If you're working with keywords and terms that are remotely competitive we're talking hundreds of backlinks. That takes a while.