Backlinks (aka: links pointing to your site) are essential to the success of your website. Links are the virtual roads that connect websites and content on the Internet. This makes them a precious commodity because, as you can imagine, the more good roads you have leading into your website the more traffic (and potential customers) you'll get.

Search engines understand the value of good backlinks and consider them a strong signal of trust online so they give them a lot of weight in their search rankings algorithms.

To earn a high quality link, a third-party site must decide a resource is valuable to their audience and add a link pointing to it on their site. When another site owner links to your site, they are essentially sending traffic away from their own site to yours. This is why links carry so much weight. So, all you have to do is create great content and links will grow naturally right?!

Unfortunately, that doesn't work because there is so much content online that even good content gets drowned out. Plus, over the years, people have come up with a ton of sly ways to manipulate the links pointing to their website to boost their rankings for specific keywords. This has caused Google to invest a lot of time and resources into targeting those strategies and devaluing 'link spam' as well as penalizing websites that it involves. These sometimes wide sweeping dragnets that Google has laid out need to be navigated carefully.

So, to avoid having your site penalized or devalued, you need to be sure the links you're building for your good content (your 'backlink profile') look Natural and Diverse in the eyes of Google. This article will break down exactly what that means and how you can go about doing it.

There are three main factors to consider as you develop and monitor your backlink profile:

• Mix of link types.
• Link neighborhood.
• Anchor text distribution.

Being mindful of these factors will help you build a balanced link portfolio that is future...