The way advanced backlinks works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, instead of back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the ‘eyes’ of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.

Search engines love links and they love some links more than others.

For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value and doesn’t receive the same weight as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link – the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.

Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The website that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hosting site get useful content.

This strategy is simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank, in strong testimonials and referrals.

It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve rankings in the search engine results pages.

Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more ‘natural’ from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages.

Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links – the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimised with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.