The Importance Of Link Building

As an Internet marketer or a website owner looking for increased traffic you undoubtedly know that links can provide substantial benefit to your efforts. A high quality link gained using ethical methods can drive direct traffic to your site and can be used to help improve your search ranking. The question of whether paid links are good or bad, is by no means a modern phenomena. As long as the benefits of linking have been known, the potential to purchase them has existed.

Virtually all forms of online advertising basically mean the procurement of some form of links. For SEO purposes, though, we will be considering only static text links with good anchor text. So, is it legitimate to purchase these links or should you only attempt to gain them organically?

Paid Advertising Is Not Necessarily A Bad Thing

Paying for advertising is not an inherently bad thing. You may buy banner advertising, or PPC advertising, or you might even rent email lists and pay for high quality articles to be distributed to this list. All of these are paid methods of advertising and perfectly legitimate. So too is paying for text link advertisements on other sites. As such, the search engines will not "penalize" you for having paid text links, even if they do manage to determine which are paid and which are natural.

Search Engines And Link Popularity

Search engines use links as a guide to how popular a website is. The more links, and the greater quality of those links, the more popular your site is seen to be. The search engines assume that the most popular are also the most beneficial so the more links you have the higher up the rankings you are likely to appear.

But search engines know that purchasing links can give a site an artifical appearance of popularity. As such, they attempt to incorporate into their algorithms some method of only offering greater rankings to thsoe sites that rely on natural or organic listings. As we mentioned above, they don't penalize you for paying for links, but they attempt to ensure that you don't receive benefit in the search rankings either.

Why Buy Links?

All of this means that if you are buying text links then you shouldn't concentrate on doing so for the benefits of your SEO link popularity. Purchase links, by all means, but ensure that those links will generate targeted traffic to your site. Try to judge whether the visitors that a link produces are really worth the money you are paying, and do not include the potential of link love in your calculations.

Organic Link Building

Organic link building may seem like a long, drawn-out, and particularly difficult task, but it will be worth it in the long run. Try to build a good foundation of links with directory listings from some of the better directories, and links from authoritative sites. It may take some serious begging with many of these latter sites, because to ensure they are relevant you will be looking at sites belonging to your main competitors.

There are a number of techniques other than emailing webmasters and requesting a link to their site, although this method does work for some. This is probably the most tedious of all link building tactics though, and you may not make many friends in the process.

Article Marketing And Link Building

This brings us on to article marketing. For those that don't know this means writing an article (like this one) including links to your own site (like those at the bottom of this page) and having the article published on other websites. This ensures that the link is placed on a relevant page and that you control the anchor text of the links. With hundreds of article directories and article submission sites it is possible to grow a serious portfolio of inbound links when done well.

A good link profile, in terms of SEO, will undoubtedly require the use of various different linking strategies. Cross channel promotion, directory submission, social link building, and individual link requests will all play a part. However, article marketing provides a sustainable and effective method of building a very good number of links in a reasonably short space of time.