Backlinks are one of the corner stones to dominating the search engines. Everyone and their mother has theories about backlinks, and the rest of them are just rehashing what they have heard or read somewhere else online.

Have you heard the one about bad backlinks could ruin your rankings?

I have a dedicated server setup that I do nothing but test on. So let’s go with the evil backlinking theory. If bad backlinks could hurt your search rankings don’t you think that the cut throat marketers, spammers, etc. would just build bad backlinks to their competitors sites?

You could generate a list of keyword phrases that you wanted to rank for and outsource the negative link building process for pennies. You could have your outsourcers build links to all of your competitors and quickly dominate any market you wanted at will.

I am constantly reverse engineering competitors for my clients. Those that are dominating the search engines have a variety of links pointing to them. You can easily identify the links that have been outsourced, and those that have been skillfully targeted.

Search Engine Domination Formula 

1. Good content – I treat all of my clients sites as if they were my own. I want content that is going to help people.
2. On Page Optimization – optimizing your website can be different for each keyword phrase. I see a lot of people giving advice such as, “always put your keyword phrase in the title”. That is not always true.Fact: No one knows what the hell Google does to rank their sites. I see some sites ranking with the keyword in the title, I also see others that do not have the keyword phrase anywhere on the page. All that we can do as marketers is reverse engineer the top ten sites for the keyword phrase that we are targeting and do a little better than our competitors.
3. Off Page Optimization – start building backlinks to your site. This is an on going process and there is never a such thing as a site having enough backlinks. You want to build your backlinks organically. You want a mixture of dofollow and nofollow links.Think about it… If the search engines see that you have nothing but dofollow links to your site, don’t you think that looks a little suspicious? Of course it does. My team uses the information in my. “Backlink Blackbook” to build links for my personal sites as well as the clients that I serve.I also outsource the crazy backlinks suck as, social bookmarking, form post, blog comments etc. In my opinion it is a waste of time for my team to be doing such tedious work. I already know that it takes approximately 100 blog comment links to equal 2 or 3 high quality links. However every little bit counts right?
4. Press Releases – OMG I have made a killing with this backlinking strategy. I am not sure why companies charge several hundred dollars to write a press release, its so simple. Although I have discovered a few strategies that give my press releases that little competitive edge over the others.Press Release Tips: Align your press release with recent events whenever possible. Your press release should always sound news worthy (search for sample press releases) there are a ton of examples online for you to follow.I wrote a press release entitled, “The King of Rock and Roll and Internet Marketing” and it spread like wild fire. Did it happen overnight? NOPE! It’s been almost a year and I am still making affiliate sales from that one little report that I wrote while sitting in Starbucks.

Although all backlinks are not created equal, a vote is a vote unless you are selling bibles and have thousands of backlinks from a porn sites. Obviously that would not be a good thing.

A Bit Of Advice Grasshopper 

Stop believing everything you hear, and read. In fact I do not want you to EVER take my word. What I want you to do is test for yourself. Everyone started yelling the sky is falling and article marketing is dead.

I love it… You keep believing that, mean while I will be enjoying your lunch money.  Article marketing is a small tool that I use to build backlinks, and traffic to my sites. It has worked and it will always work. After all what is article marketing? It’s content? What does the search engines want? Content!

If you were writing B.S. articles, then the rumor is true. Article marketing is in deed dead for you. However for those who are distributing good content, the good times are continuing to roll, and the backlinks our adding up.

You should be dedicating 75% of your online marketing efforts towards building high quality backlinks to your site.

The Google Dance

While building your backlinks you will notice often times your rankings will drop initially. Newbies will often begin hitting the panic button and running out in the streets yelling that the sky is falling. They will immediately stop all of their link building efforts because they believe it was the link building that caused their rankings to drop.

If you are tracking your rankings the way you should be doing – you will notice that various pages on your site are always fluctuating. I run reports on a weekly basis for newer sites and on a monthly basis for older sites. Your job is to keep plowing forward, and it will all pan out.

I think I have rambled on long enough, and I hope that I have given you something of value.