Effective Link Building

SEO has a long list of dos and don’ts. One of the biggest that we’ve seen in the news lately is link buying. Link buying services take a nominal fee and then place a link to your site within hundreds or even thousands of, typically low quality, websites. Not only is this a waste of money, it is a good way to attract the ire of Google. Because links are so important to SEO, though, how do you build them without buying them or violating search engine policies?

Sites like JC Penney and Overstock.com found out why it is not a good idea to buy links; each site was penalised by Google and saw dramatic decreases in their search rankings. If your site purchases links, or an SEO company working on your behalf does, then your site could be penalised or even pulled from Google’s results.

Likewise, link exchanges are targets for Google’s algorithm. This is when you link to a website, and they link back to yours. In some cases, this is absolutely legitimate. But if the connection is “unnatural,” which most search algorithms are able to detect, then your site faces penalties. In some cases, your site may be linked with sites of low quality, and this hurts your rankings as well.

Organic links are much more effective, and they are more difficult to get. You have to create solid, quality content that gets others in your industry or field excited or interested. Whether it is an entertaining blog post or an informative article on a new development in your field, it has to offer something of value to readers and prompt other sites to link back to you. No website wants to alienate their own visitors by sending them to low quality sites, so these links are good endorsements. Try videos, blogs with “top ten” lists, and infographics.

Another avenue to pursue is finding websites that relate in some way to yours and contacting their webmaster or owner. You can offer to write a guest blog post or give an interview. This is becoming more common, and so webmasters may have fielded their share of these requests. This can either mean that they are amenable to your situation or they’re not. In either case, though, it is worth it to try in order to get that quality link back to your site.

Go for organic links. They are more challenging and time-consuming to obtain, but they are vastly more effective and beneficial for your site.