If Content Is “King”, Link Building Is “Queen”

I have seen some advertisements that promise optimizing your website in one shot by submitting your sites to millions of websites. They always hide the importance of “quality” inbound link building and the ongoing services needed to truly achieve success.

Ongoing Link Building for Search Engine Optimization Success

Building high quality inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to improve your site rankings. It’s the most challenging (but rewarding!) component of an integrated search engine optimization strategy.

Simply put, the more quality inbound links your page has, the more popular it is – and search engines like popular pages.

Search engine algorithms are always evolving and, so should link building techniques:

The continuing evolution of ranking algorithms necessitates a re-evaluation of the link building strategies.

The problem is that a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) firms and websites are still peddling outdated information. The truth is, many of the standard link building techniques that once formed the backbone of an SEO campaign are no longer effective. In fact, they can even be detrimental to your web site's search engine positioning.

Make it “Natural”

Search engines like natural link structure. The challenge for most sites is to accumulate enough incoming links to appear relevant to the engines without tripping any one of the many spam filters and penalties that are applied to sites that cheat.

For example: Artificial links tend to be identical, tend to be reciprocal and can sprout in great numbers all of a sudden. Natural links vary in anchor text and increase gradually as referral sites add links one by one over time.

Keeping these facts in mind, one should strive to build the most natural-looking incoming-link structure possible.

Concluding Thoughts

A good SEO company should analyze your site along with your competition, and come up with strategies for quality link building that will help you now and also in the long run.

The secret to getting it right is to... take the search engine's point of view when building your incoming link structure.

(If you haven’t already, please check out the SEO myths and Old School Practices blog entry for some other out-dated search engine optimization strategies.)