Contextual Backlinks – Do you Need them?

By now chances are you know you need backlinks for your website, but more specifically, links with original, quality content surrounding them known as contextual backlinks. The tantamount variable to any successful offpage search engine optimization campaign is links so let’s take a look at why you would want these links versus other means.

SiteWide Links: Sitewide links are links that are just that – sitewide. They usually appear in the footer, header, sidebar, or blogroll of a website and are surrounded by the same text on every page. This leaves a footprint (an identifying trackable reoccurrence) that the search engines are now smart enough to pick up on. These links are not seen as relevant because the link is not surrounded by related keyword rich text, and is ubiquitous throughout the site, lowering their value due to law of diminishing returns. These links are powerful, but they have limitations and are best used as an ancillary approach to a long term strategy of in content links.

Reciprocal: While these can be in context links, they will be devalued as the search engines will see it’s not necessarily a vote (a link can be seen as a vote for a website), but rather a mutual exchange of votes in order to benefit both parties. Reciprocal links still have value, but one way in context links are the way to go.

Added benefits of Contextual backlinks - *Also* Check out this quality hub on the best practices when buying backlinks once you completely understand in content backlinks.

Longevity: Over time, webpages will change their format and alter their sitewide links, but in content links are usually made via blog post or article within an inner page of a website. To remove these links would take considerable more effort on the webmasters part, and therefore they are much safer to last for the longhual.

Relevancy: The search engines are becoming very adept at determining relevancy on page, as their spiders scan the entire backend of your site for relevant meta tags as well as onpage text content. This means a web page that is predominately about red widgets will pass more trust and ranking onto anchor text websites associated with red widgets. Now, many people will laugh at relevancy and obtain rankings without factoring it in, but the best links are those relevant to the content they are surrounded by. In the end though, a link is a link, but those spiders are getting smarter every day and won’t trust a link to cure grandmas Alzheimer when the content was primarily about refinancing your mortgage.

Trust: In content links are trusted more by search engines because they exhibit the tell tale signs of what a backlink truly is (a vote for a website). When bloggers write about topics chances are the text surrounding their “vote” is going to be somewhat related. For this reason google knows if a technology blogger is blogging about cheap laptops and then links off to a site with anchor text “buy cheap laptops” this link meets the criteria for trust because it’s 1) surrounded by relevant text 2) relevant anchor text. The anchor text of course is the phrase that is used when using html to hyperlink back to a website.

Law of Diminishing Returns: As noted by some great analysts such as SEOmoz, the robots begin to see you have thousands of links from one website, on one ip, and don’t add as much weigh to each additional link, unlike high pagerank backlinks which typically come with less diversity but with more power. With contextual backlinks, this is usually a non issue, as blogs and article directories are typically hosted on unique ip addresses which appears more natural in the search engine eyes as people from all over the world are talking about your website and voting for it.

Ways to obtain contextual backlinks

Thankfully there is a multitude of options, both free and paid to keep you busy obtaining these links. The most common approach is through blog posting as well as article writing.

Free: There is a plethora of free blog hosting platforms that allow you to not only create your own blog on either a subdomain or part subfolder, but also allow you to post content to them. This means you’re in the driver seat and determine what content surrounds your links, as well as the anchor text and how many backlinks you wish to create. Some of these platforms are squidoo, hubpages, livejournal, wordpress and blogger. A search on your favorite search engine for, create my own blog, will yield hundreds of results for you to build up your personal network that you can control.

Press Releases are also an all too often overlooked vehicle to create incontext backlinks. One of the most famous paid services is prweb but there are plenty of free pr syndication services. Just remember that the free services will typically fail out over the next couple years, so use them in conjunction with other efforts.

Article Writing is very similar to the blogging approach. It’s really semantics but there are article website directories that allow you to post links within the content. If they don’t allow it actually within the post there is usually a resource box, with enough characters to create the appearance of a contextual backlink. Just be sure to maximize the available space and always use unique content to bolster your indexing rates. If you have a large site, and your sitemap isn't cutting it, you can also look to index your backlinks with http://backlinksindexer.com/ which basically helps your deep linked in content blog posts to get spidered by Google.

Paid: The paid methods are essentially the free ones without as much effort. You can create these blog networks with software such as SEnuke but even that program doesn’t create blogs to all the available ones. You can also use a software tool such as The Best Spinner to create multiple versions of your article in order to ensure indexing and leverage your existing content for more backlinks. Paid press releases like we mentioned, along with pay per post programs (don’t use mainstream ones). You could even contact bloggers in your niche and ask to pay them if they add an article you write (people are lazy and won’t want to write an article for you). Supply the article and the money and they might oblige you.

Search engines are getting smarter, and contextual links are the last frontier to be devalued, because there is simply no easy way to discern what is a legit backlink or not via this format. If you have exhausted some of the free options and would like to purchase contextual links please check out http://backlinksvault.com/homepage-contextual-backlinks/ and begin to reap the benefits of high pagerank links today.