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Written by Larry Dearing
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Sunday, 20 December 2009 12:14 |
The practice of building links to your website from other sites is known as link building, or off-site SEO. There are differing opinions as to whether this practice is really effective for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes or if its a waste of energy. How you engage in this practice can affect your site for better or for worse.
One of the factors the search engines may use to determine your website's page ranking and where it appears on the search return pages (SERP) is the amount and quality of links on the internet linking back to your site. The idea behind this is that if a lot of sites think you are important enough to link to then your site must really be important. It doesn't necessarily work out that way. If you are building back links for the purpose of increasing your search engine position you may be wasting your time or actually hurting your situation.
Over the couple years Google has refined their algorithms to look for the quality in the back links, not just the quantity and frowns on what it thinks to be link building schemes just for the purposed of gaming the system. This practice has become to be considered part of the Black Hat SEO techniques used by unscrupulous SEO practitioners to get fast results and move their sites high into the search engine results.
Practices such as buying links, using reciprocal links from unrelated websites, publishing links in the hundreds of free link directories while certainly having the potential to help your ranking considerably in the short term, these techniques will probably catch up to you. Over time the search engines will suspect more more of your off-site efforts to be link spam only for obtaining page rank and SERP placement. Your site will loose its ranking and may actually be penalized or banned.
Building back links is still very important but not from an SEO standpoint. Too many web masters worry about SEO, page rank and SERPs while forgetting about what back links are really valuable in driving direct traffic to your site. You may have hundreds of back links out there but if they are in questionable places few if anyone is actually seeing them and following them to your site. Build links the slow and old fashion way by providing value and networking with other site owners. When you are building quality back links from relative sites, you are driving more qualified traffic directly to your site. This is much better than search engine placement.
Quality back links and the subsequent traffic is only the beginning of the magic. As your site grows its credibility and picks up more back links naturally from the right sources the search engines will pick up on this quality, see your site and more authoritative and will begin to move it up in its search return pages. This natural climb in search engine ranking will also bring more traffic to your website.
You might want to rethink not only your strategies for link building, but also the real motive. You have to be honest with yourself here. If you concentrate on building links to bring in quality traffic and not SEO alone, after a while you will be pleasantly surprised with your outcome. |
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