Link Building Basics

It’s now common knowledge that inbound links are ridiculously important to the success of your site. Receiving a link is a ‘vote’ in a search engine’s eyes, and now energy seems to be (necessarily) focused on how to obtain as many links as possible. But there is more to it than that, and the right amount of links, the right kind of links, is just as important and overlooked by eager newbies wanting a quick boost in rankings. It will take time and know-how to develop links more naturally and in such a way that you get the most bang for your buck.

Now in the long term, your focus on having a visitor friendly site, with material that a visitor wants to see, will be rewarded by the search engines. And of course increase conversions and loyalty. So be careful not to lose the perspective of your customer, your visitor, and make your site what the public wants.

However, in this day and age you absolutely cannot ignore the massive amount of SEO work that must be done if you want to show up in search. Unless your site just naturally refills itself with content every few days, unless you are a rockstar in your industry and people just link to you all the time for fun, then you will have to manipulate your site to be what the search engines want too. And for most of us, it is just not all that natural to keep writing articles, more and more paragraphs of words. At some point it is just sheer nonsense, continuously adding content whether the visitor needs it or not. But alas, it must be done.

The fact is that you will have to plan a link building campaign. It should include link baiting such as writing amazing content whether your visitors need it or not, authority valuable articles, doing article submissions and press release and social media marketing. These are typically your smaller links and smaller votes. But you will also have to find some high value links, from high PR sites, or other authority sites such as EDU or GOV sites. And further, the fact is that most of the high ranking sites are buying some of these links, it’s just the way it is.

The basics for a good link campaign: Well rounded, and well timed. A variety of links from numerous sources, some from authority sites and some from new sites and blogs. Watch not to build too many too fast, a spike will be detected. Keep anchor text relevant but varied. Use internal pages as well, especially high content pages. Links embedded in relevant content are hands down the most valuable, strive for as many as possible.

Sounds like a lot of work? The best link building is just plain time consuming, there is no way around it, and more and more companies are hiring it out in some fashion.