3 THINGS YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT LINK BUILDING

This post is inspired by a great article I read by Erin Everhart at Search Engine Land. Everything she mentions are things I’ve said to a client at one point or another (sometimes more than once) because at the end of the day I can’t do my job well if our clients are pushing for something we don’t/won’t/can’t do. The better our clients understand the rules of link building the better their results will be.

Don’t go black hat (for even a minute).

More than once I’ve been asked to just “try” a spammy or black hat link building tactic to see what happens (it can’t be that bad, right?) and more than once we’ve had to put out foot down and say no. As a white hat SEO firm, Brick Marketing won’t even toe the line of black hat link building. Yes, it can work and work incredibly well. But doing well by toeing the line requires an immense amount of work and quite a bit of luck. It’s not worth the risk! We recently started working with a client that freely admitted they had cheated a little bit when it came to their link building (as white hat as black hat can be, according to them), but thought that it was pretty minimal compared to their competitors; they assumed they’d be fine. Turns out they weren’t fine. They got hit hard by Penguin and it took two years to fully recover! In that time their entire SEO campaign was in fix-it mode, and they lost a lot of ground because they didn’t grow.

Link building never ends.

Erin make a great point; “Can you go to the gym for three months, stop and then expect to keep those ten pounds off?” The same is true for link building. You can coast on your past link building efforts for a little while, but if you aren’t actively seeking new link building opportunities sooner or later you’re going to run out of steam and the coasting will come to an end. While the future of links is up in the air (Google has said they are still important, although many wonder just how important they will be in a few years), until we know otherwise links are a huge factor in determining the authority and relevancy of your website. There is only one #1 spot and you can bet that every single one of your competitors is gunning for your number one spot. If you give up on your link building how long can you really hold it?

Great links don’t just appear.

Yes, when you first start your link building campaign chances are there are few “easy win” links that you can scoop up to kick start your link building. But fairly quickly those links disappear and most of your link building is tedious, time consuming, and very manual. Great links don’t usually fall into your lap (although if they do you better run with them!), they are the result of a lot of digging and researching and manual outreach. It might take several days, if not weeks, to finally nail down that great link. You might have to pitch several sites, write 3 or 4 pieces of content, go back and forth about establishing a partnership, and more in order to lock down that link.

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=129