Your Link Building Strategy Is Crucial to Your SEO Success

Link building, back linking, call it what you will, is nothing new. For years now search engines have been analysing the inbound links to you site and weighing the volume, quality and relevance to help value your content. So why is it more crucial than ever?

Link building used to be a much simpler affair than it is now. If you could get a high volume of pretty much any content linking to you all was good. This was created a mini industry as link farming and link exchange programs became an increasingly popular method of leveraging your position in the SERPs.

The days of link farming were always numbered, even as we worked out we could use them, the search engine boffins were already recalculating their algorithms, closing the loophole that was being exploited.

In today’s market, the search engines warn webmasters against any form of linking schemes, to the extent where sites can be penalised for links with no contextual relevance. So with the rules tightened up so much, let’s look at why your link building strategy is so crucial.

Why is Link Building So Important Now?

The concept behind inbound links as a measure of a relevance is fundamentally very sound. A page on a subject that’s linked to by other authorities in the same field is more likely to be useful to the searcher than one that isn’t linked to.

Search engines don’t like it when an exploit is found and misused by the market. When such an exploit has occurred, it’s only human nature to almost “over-fix” it, to make sure that it can’t be misused again. As a result of this extra work, on really concentrating on the quality and relevance of links, you can logically assume that a higher importance can be attributed to this area of the algorithm.

So given a sound logical concept that site linking is a good indicator of importance, and given that the search engines have done a lot of work on this area of their algorithms, it can be safely assumed that this is now an area of high importance in their ranking calculations.

An Emphasis on Quality Links

Link building takes effort, substantial effort. It’s no longer good enough to just get vaguely related sites to drop a link somewhere in their content. Now we need to be much more focused, targeting not only the web sites we want to link to us, but the actual content pages where we’d like them to link to us, right down to the way they link to us and the words they use.

Instead of looking at link building as simply a numbers game, we need to be looking at links on an individual basis, focusing on highly ranked relevant content areas from trusted sites and working from that point.

Instead of focusing entirely on the creation of the link, we need to be thinking more about how a link between two pages will help each site. If we can see that it does, then creating the connection will be much easier, and much more likely to ‘hit’ with the search engines.

Content Development and Linking

When developing feeder sites, writing articles, press releases and news items keep to your usual quality standards. Feeder sites with high quality content are much more likely to get ranked and should also be able to send you real visitors.

Article writing should always be of high quality if you’re offering it out for free syndication. It’s effectively the only part of the eventual linking pages you can control so it’s your only chance to have a direct influence on the quality of the inbound link.

When contributing to industry forums, if you include a link in your signature (which you always should, when it’s allowed), don’t just use a standard home page one. Link it to some relevant content and label it accordingly. This improves the link and gives you a better chance of attracting direct traffic.

When using social bookmarking sites, don’t just submit your own content and leave. Join in with the community to become visible. In these channels you really need to participate fully if you want to benefit from their positive effects.

Continual Development Strategy

Link building is not a project. It should be a daily part of life in building your online audience. Track your output and monitor your results on a regular basis, following up any links that drop away as well as recording new ones.

Links can often get accidently lost in redesigns so letting the link partner know can be all it takes to get your link reinstated if this happens to you. In relation to getting new links, that’s a fraction of the work.