Mommy, Where Do Backlinks Come From?

Backlinks are the most important part of your SEO marketing efforts. You can select as many keywords as you want, and optimize your site as much as possible, but without links, your website will not get anywhere. Getting enough of the right kind of links can make your site move up the rankings. But what are the right kind of links, and where do they come from? Although not as unbelievable as babies being brought home by a large bird with a blanket in it's beak, there are some misconceptions about the type and number of links needed to get a website ranked. Here are a few of them:

1) If some is good, more is better. Actually, up to a point, this is true. However, some people want so badly to get their website ranked that they go overboard. And, there are plenty of companies that are willing to help them do it. Anyone who wants top can buy 1,000 links a day for $60-$100. But, backlinks are supposed to look as natural as possible. Unless a site is from a brand name, highly popular site, nobody can naturally get 1,000 links a day, and you don't know where these links are coming from.
2) In order to be ranked high, I have to get links from high PR sites. No, you don't. Of course, you do want quality links, and you don't want a lot of PR0, or low PR, sites. Remember, though, that your links have to look natural. Getting links only from high PR sites, especially if your site is fairly new, is too obviously fake. Getting links from a variety of sites, with different PR levels, is more natural.
3) Links have to be from sites related to my industry. Nope, wrong again. Your competitors are not going to provide you with links, so your site will rank higher than theirs. Also, your visitors are not going to come only from industries related to yours, so your links shouldn't either. Consider this - a single mother, writing a blog about her experiences as a single mother. She looks forward to  the break she gets during the summer when her son goes to camp. Of course, she needs to make sure he has the right camping equipment.
Your site sells, and would like to be ranked for, "camping equipment". Can she put a link to your site in the blog, using the phrase "camping equipment"? Of course she can!

One of the problems we see whenever we do a preliminary analysis of a website is, "XX% of the External Incoming Links may be considered "Paid Links" because they are NOT editorially given". An editorial link is the type of link mentioned above - a link from a phrase that occurs naturally in the flow of a blog entry or article. This is the type of link the search engines are looking for. This type of link, from a wide variety of sources, is what you should be giving them.