Link Building

If you have looked into the services of an SEO before a term you may have heard about is “link building”. What you need to know is that Google has recently stated publicly that this is a practise you should avoid and can lead to more harm than good for your search engine rankings.

Google’s early success came about largely because of their patented PageRank algorithm. This allowed websites that were more popular and had more links to them from other websites to rank higher in the search results. This quickly became abused by SEO’s and Google has been working on making it harder and harder to succeed using unnatural linking techniques.

Google wants you to build a great website with great content and have authoritative websites linking to the content. They do not want random, purposeless links to your website strewn through the internet in blog posts and internet directories that no one uses.

Make sure you question any SEO expert or SEO company salesperson that is proposing link building to you.

The best way to get links is to provide content that others would want to link to. Think about how to use your assets to your advantage such as content, data, products, services and people. Some of the ways you can hook people are by providing news, humour, controversial content, data visualisation, competitions and ego-bait where you write about a person or organisation with the hope they will link to you. One smart technique to get people linking to your website is to out do a leading article in your field and then notify people that will share your link with individuals in your field.