During the past year my thinking about link-building best practices has greatly evolved, partially due to a greater immersion in social media marketing where the focus is on creating great content and an authentic engagement with the community, as well as to listening what Google has to say about how it assesses websites.

Increasingly, I've come to believe that the best backlinking strategy is a 100% authentic strategy, creating content that is of value to users — build it and they will come — and engaging with the community to share your knowledge and expertise and increase awareness of what you have to offer. To supplement this, there are a handful of directories where site submissions are human-reviewed and the directories themselves have a high PageRankGoogle's metric for how popular a site is on the Web, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better). The biggest factor is how many external sites link to yours, and the authority, popularity and relevance of those sites..
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