Those familiar with the notion of backlinks are aware of their utmost importance for generating organic traffic to a website. As it was shown by the Ahrefs study, more than 90% of it is generated not by Google search. What remains unclear is the distinction between non-natural and natural backlinks and ways to build a portfolio of the latter.
Organic traffic is made of visitors who find you by unpaid search results, by ways other than clicking paid ads. Someone could say that being natural implies being organic, but will still be confused with a somewhat vague key definition and, as a result, be struggling with a task to build them.
What Does Natural Backlinks Mean?
One of those who tried to define natural backlinks was Matt Cutts, currently the administrator of the U.S. Digital Service who has been with Google since 2000. In his post a long time ago he made two assertions:
- Natural backlinks are better than non-natural, and
- Those are the links that are natural, not just look natural.
Some of the commentators saw it as a poor defining attempt. To think of, if Matt Cutts from Google himself didn’t get any closer to a concise and clear definition, what’s so strange about many SEO managers of today finding it very confusing?
The idea is clear, though: it all depends on the content relevance. If your website’s content is of high relevance to people clicking on the backlinks that lead to it and doesn’t disappoint them afterward, you are indeed working in the right direction.
One of the most important instances, where this can be vital for business development, is the case of bootstrap business www.imnewswatch.com. It means building a new company from scratch with nothing but personal savings and cash later generated by first sales. It’s hard to not to see how important it will be for the business to attract natural traffic as its clients.
How to Build Natural Backlinks
With that in mind, let’s have a look at several ways of doing that right. With no generally accepted definition of natural backlinks, it is still possible to base decisions on their assumed characteristics, i.e.:
- Content relevance – meaning what comes as text around the backlink,
- Value the readers in terms of additional information,
- Meaningful integration within the text.
1. Guest Posting
Having that, the obvious way to implement a natural backlink-building strategy is making content for thematic blogs to attract your target audience. There are a couple of recommendations of how to do that:
- “Small steps first”. As it would likely be the case with any bootstrap company, owners won’t have much content to offer to external webmasters and convince them to place a natural backlink to their websites. It would be better to look for those who are also new in the industry and cooperate initially instead of trying to sink each other from the start.
- “Link customers to your products”. It may sound obvious, although not always done correctly. Being natural from that point of view means making a sales offer to website visitors. Mentioning your product in a blog post means that readers should be given an opportunity to purchase it straight away instead of browsing through your website’s content.
2. Purchasing Natural Backlinks
For a developing company, especially a bootstrap one, this is not always relevant from the start, although it is an option to consider later. Why not check for the best place to buy backlinks? This means not simply paying external bloggers for content placement. The commercial way of doing that has much wider opportunities, such as purchasing high-quality software with a user-friendly interface for fast and easy building of backlink portfolios.
- Look for free trial options as with them you get the opportunity to see how well the product fits your demands.
- Functionality matters. The market for backlink management tools is wide and still growing. There are offers with limited options to make natural backlinks of your desire, although at affordable prices. See if that suits you in the initial stage.
3. Digital Public Relations
Here is another great option for business with at least some reputation. What makes it so great is that:
- It is still about the natural content,
- That content is created by others, and
- Unbelievable, but they can even do that for free!
This can only be achieved with a thoroughly planned digital PR campaign because it takes a lot to persuade professional journalists and even blog post writers to listen to your opinion on a certain subject and mention your organization in their thematic industry overviews as a result.
Getting Your Backlinks Natural
There is hope that the notion of natural backlinks is now a bit clearer to all SEO-related readers. Without a strict definition, there are, however, certain ways of backlink building that take this specificity into account. Not all of them are suitable for young growing companies, but at least they can make your links natural.
