A lot of search engine optimization companies, right here in Phoenix, will tell you that link building is the key to a successful SEO campaign.
In my humble opinion, that’s a load of crap.
It wasn’t always a load of crap; there was a time when the volume of your site’s inbound links (Google’s PageRank) affected the SERPs quite a bit. And inbound links continue to be a factor in good SEO; I will never deny that. However, it’s no longer the number of links that you need to think about, but rather, the quality of those links.
In other words: One good link from a major, relevant website trumps 50,000 links from junk sites.
But I digress; back to the load of crap. Link building strategies are mostly a load of crap because many times, when an SEO company tells you that they will “build links” for you, that just means that they are going to provide you with a ton of worthless links, from blogs that are set up strictly for the purpose of bogus linking. This is especially true if you hire a non-American company. That is never, ever a good idea.
These SEO geniuses take one article (stuffed with keywords of course), spin it to the point of unreadability, and then post it on twenty-five thousand blogs scattered throughout Russia and the Philippines. They will usually pay a non-American worker $50 to do it on elance.com and then turn around and charge you $500 or more.
Of course, they won’t tell you any of this. They’ll just show you a link report at the end of the month, which clearly illustrates that they acquired all of these wonderful links for you- exactly as promised- and you’ll be forced to live up to your end of the bargain and pay up. You may even pay up happily and with joy in your heart, because you actually believe that getting two thousand new links to your site in a matter of a couple of days is a smart idea.
Then there is a Google update, such as the recent Penguin update, and your site drops into oblivion.
Other companies blatantly offer to purchase text links for you on relevant sites. For example, let’s say I had a really great blog on Real Estate SEO & Marketing, and you happened to be a designer who specializes in real estate websites. A link from my site would be relevant and would make sense. So the text link broker calls me up and offers me a small fee to put a link to your site.
Matt Cutts says that buying links is prohibited behavior by Google, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t still do it. In fact, here is a poll that shows about 50% of the people (at the time this article was written) do agree that buying text links can be beneficial for SEO.
My honest feelings? I do think that buying a text link from a relevant site would help me, but I’m just too paranoid. I know it’s against the rules, and even though the chance of getting caught is slim (if you are very smart about it that is), I’d rather not take any chances.
I’ve ranked many sites in Google and I’ve never used a typical link building strategy as part of my search engine optimization methods. Don’t get me wrong; I want links; I want thousands and thousands of links! But I want to get them the right way. If you hire our SEO gurus for your campaign, we won’t have to pay anyone to link to you; people will want to link to you.
And how do we encourage natural, innocent, white-hat linking?
Three words: Social Media Marketing
By using a combination of social networks and by posting useful, fresh content targeted to the very people that will want to read it- your pages will be shared and liked and plussed and tweeted. When people who are very active in social networks post a photo from your website, or re-tweets on of your post, it creates the best kind of link.
As the search engines evolve, the importance of what “real people” have to say is weighing more and more heavily on actual search engine results. Rather than focus our linking strategy on purchasing links or black-hat link-bots; we believe that the best links are free and actually quite easy to obtain.
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