seo-backlinks

# SEO Backlinks: Strategy, Acquisition, and Brand Mentions Most SEO tooling stops at link analysis: it tells you what your profile looks like and leaves you alone for the hard part. This skill covers the hard part: how to actually acquire links and brand mentions, by hand, with a defensible strategy, without a paid tool subscription and without an outreach agency. It operates on a dual objective that defines off-page SEO in 2026: 1. **Links for Google.** Backlinks remain a major ranking factor in classic organic search. 2. **Mentions everywhere for LLMs.** Brand mentions (linked or not) correlate roughly 3x more strongly with visibility in AI answers than backlinks do. Ahrefs measured this across 75,000 brands: correlation of 0.664 for brand mentions versus 0.218 for backlinks against AI Overview presence (https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/). Every action this skill recommends should serve at least one of those two objectives, and the best actions serve both: a profile on a well-known platform is a link for Google and a citation surface for ChatGPT. ## Company knowledge first (Obsidian) If the working environment contains an Obsidian vault or any local knowledge base (a folder of .md notes, often with a .obsidian directory), read the relevant notes before acting: brand and product facts, target keywords, competitors, and the SEO action log of what was already tried. Ground every recommendation in that context instead of asking the user for facts the ...