Content or Backlinks? What’s most important to get on Google’s first page?
What should you do first if you want to your site take off? Create new backlinks or create new content?
The two most important things you need to do to get on the first page of Google and gain the market share you want are writing unique content and earning a few thousand quality backlinks. Unfortunately, there’s no manual or a how-to-do list because each website is a special case and depends on your competition and market size. So how do you beat the competition and get ahead of all the other sites with the keywords you want?
Why do we need backlinks?
First, we need to clarify what a backlink is. A backlink is a link that points from a website to ours with a keyword. According to Google, when this link is in the other website’s main text, we say that it is a contextual link and has the greatest possible value.
If the site that gives us the backlink is very high quality, according to Google, we pass much more value (domain authority) to our site. The more quality backlinks we get from quality sites, such as universities, government agencies, ministries, major newspapers, business guides, the better we will get on Google search results pages.
SEO factors that affect the quality of the backlink
The over 200 SEO factors that are supposed to affect how well a website will rank in Google search results and relate to backlinks are around fifty. Also, note that SEO has a positive and negative balance, and some backlinks may be considered negative backlinks that lead to a drop instead of a rise in search engines. That’s why you need affordable SEO services to undertake your website and protect you from negative backlinks.
Content-Based SEO Factors:
Content seems to be at the forefront because there are so many of these factors that Google and other search engines like Yandex consider when deciding what matters and what doesn’t on the first page. It should be noted that every year the trend is for Google to give more and more weight to the content at the expense of backlinks.
This is because backlinks are easier to manipulate and can be created with Black Hat SEO techniques. On the contrary, producing quality content is a laborious and arduous process, and one cannot easily or quickly deceive the search engines today.
Who is the winner?
Some American SEO experts say that 85% of SEO results come from backlinks, while the remaining 15% from content, no matter how incredible, quality, unique, or unrepeatable.
And you can see this because there are many websites with thin or minimal content still coming out first on Google. But, at the same time, other sites with thousands of pages and high-quality articles, or even shops with thousands of products remain obscure and aren’t found anywhere.
Which types of backlink to prefer and which to avoid?
Backlinks from blogger, wordpress.com, and not wordpress.org sites and websites like wix, yola, etc., seem to have zero or no value in Google. This is because Google sees and counts all these backlinks from these sites like social media signals, and to get some small boost, you should have 100 to 200 notifications every day. From about 100 such social signals on different social media, Google is starting to give you more points and give you a temporary boost to your site. Spending to get five backlinks from such sites is like getting five likes on Facebook or four in Google Plus. If you don’t have the time and money to spend, it’s better to create ten or twenty real profiles on various social media and make your website posts and notifications there to collect backlinks and traffic than to do something else.
If you can spend more time, you should post your website in various directories on the internet or some high-profile sites or place an advertising banner with the prospect of staying there permanently.
Backlinks via Guest Posts
Guest blogging is none other than to write as a guest friendship blog or host articles from other editors-bloggers on our site in exchange for a valuable link to our page. The benefit is mutual because the blog owner acquires unique, quality content for his website, and the author gets the link to the page and visitors.
Too many of these articles, wedges, or guest posts often come out on top of Google and search engines and have become sources of high traffic and customer savings thanks to many professionals today.
Backlinks from blogger
Many believe that Google has recently degraded the role and value of the blogger. Blogger is a free digital blog platform provided by Google. The truth is that Google hasn’t changed anything in its algorithm for the blogger. On the contrary, the competition has intensified in general, and other sites on more competitive and professional platforms such as WordPress have filled the first places of search results.
Create unique content yourself
The best recipe for getting the right and quality backlinks for your website is to offer unique, quality content to the end-user. Find out what your average customer is up to today and give them as much information as you can. You will be surprised if your article is of good quality with how many people will make notifications on Facebook and other social media and how many will mention you on their website and give you a backlink. This is also the only way that Google suggests today to follow if you want to gain a quality backlink.