We are huge proponents of slow and steady wins the race. While garnering a high Google ranking is important for organic search, don’t worry about backlinks too much. Instead, concentrate on creating the most compelling, interesting, and sharable content you can when starting out.

Quality backlinks are simply links back to your site from higher ranked web sites or blogs. Matt Cutts, the head of search at Google said last year that while backlinks will still be important for years to come they will eventually become less important. Right now, backlinks are relevant to search status, but you have to go about getting them the right way.

In order to get quality backlinks you should always go the organic route. Write quality guest posts on fellow blogs that have a higher pagerank than your blog. Build relationships with influential bloggers and build a real relationship with them. Eventually, they may ask for or accept a guest post for you. In order to build quality backlinks you must go the long.

Be sure to use social media and routinely link back to your blog. Whatever you do, don’t pay to be listed in directories that promise hundreds of quality backlinks to your site. Those are spammy sites and you won’t see a boost in your Google ranking.

One thing we have seen that works well is writing thorough how-to articles. People are constantly looking for information so the more you can weave in some expertise in your blog the more people will share it, link back to your posts, and the greater chance people will discover your how-to articles in the search engines especially as your posts mature over the years. We have seen some of our posts get revived after many, many years because the search engines eventually pick them up and give them a second life and high ranking.

While SEO and getting backlinks is important, focus instead on writing compelling content and backlinks will fall into place.