As an internet/network marketer, one of my favorite ways of marketing any of my online business opportunities is through search engine optimization or SEO. As with any marketing strategy, SEO has some advantages and some disadvantages when it comes to getting your content ranked on the first page of Google. If you’ve happened to have read any of my previous post on SEO, you would know that I believe there are three golden rules to providing a good SEO strategy:

Writing Good Content
Performing Keyword Research with Low to Medium Competition
Building Quality, Niche-Related Backlinks To Your Content.

All three aspects of SEO are important in getting in good with Google, but the third one can be somewhat tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you don’t have the necessary tools to create a good backlinking infrastructure. One thing that often concerns me is the use of automated back linking tools. Now I know some people who use these tools would probably swear by them, but in my opinion, automated back linking tools can do as much damage to your content than good.

The Truth About Automated BackLinking Tools

Prior to the recent changes in Google’s Panda and Penguin search algorithms, many internet marketers used automated back linking tools that provided a fast, convenient and efficient way of creating backlinks on several different types of website platforms. These tools were used to provide backlinks on almost any type of site you could think of from Web 2.0, to blog and article directories, forums, video marketing platforms, and list of other sites.

Don’t get me wrong, these are all still great places to get quality back links to your site. But I find that when using automated link building tools, the ‘quality‘ of your back links to your content will decrease dramatically, which could cost you your first rank position on Google. And for some, the fall from the first page is much greater than others and sometimes it requires a lot of hard work to climb back up to the top.

Long gone are the days when internet marketers could just buy an automated back linking tool, build their back linking infrastructure to their money site (your money site is often referred to the site that you are trying to rank for in search engines) and sit back and watch as the backlinks start building up. Most people don’t understand that SEO is a process and what I mean by that is implementing SEO, when done properly over time, can produce a dramatic increase in traffic and sales using your content.

A Good Way To Use Automated Backlinking Tools

In my opinion, SEO works best if you provide organic back links to your quality content online by providing what are known as Tier 1 backlinks. Tier 1 backlinks are backlinks that you create through the use of placing links on sites with high page rank authority, but also has some correlation with your niche market. Building your own Tier 1 back links takes sometime, but will be well worth it in the long run. This gives you more control over what back links are pointing back at your content instead of an automated backlinking tool that spreading your link juice in places that it shouldn’t be.

The best way to utilize your automated back linking tools is to use your Tier 1 back links as your money site within the automated tool to create what are known as Tier 2 back links. Tier 2 back links are links that point back at your organically created Tier 1 backlinks . This process ensures that you will maximize the likelihood of getting rank without receiving a penalty from Google because this back linking infrastructure will look more “natural” in Google’s eyes.

I would recommend using an automated backlinking tools as an SEO strategy for promoting Tier 1 backlinks to get more bang for your buck as most of these tools that are being sold on the Internet can be quite pricey.

If you currently using automated back linking tools in your SEO marketing strategy, I would love to hear how well they are working for you. I’ve used a number of different ones so I would like to get someone’s opinion on their experience with these tools. Please feel free to leave me a comment here on the blog.