Inbound links are the most overlooked and probably misunderstood part of building a successful presence on the web. Many small business owners put big effort into building their website up nice, have lots of great content, and spend a lot of time and money doing so. But when it comes to getting links, they have no idea how to do it – beyond calling a few friends and vendors and asking for them.
Unfortunately for them, links are a very important of your overall online strategy. Getting links by means of article marketing and directory submission, although considered a low-level way to expand, still counts as a valid inbound link building strategy. And links by these means are good, just not great.
There are some great programs out there that help you automate some of this low level link building. But how do you know when automatically submitting links by the dozen is too much of a good thing?
In my opinion, you should definitely moderate the approach to using one of these services. If you have a website that hasn’t really had any decent inbound links added in months (or years), then a sudden influx of links to your site is going to look unnatural and will probably raise a fmall flag at the search engines. Just what you don’t want.
So start small. Ten links this week, ten next week. Twelve or fifteen the week after, and so on. Take it slow, push down very gently on that gas pedal, and start moving forward in a somewhat unnoticeable manner.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Good stuff Will. Is there any truth to the thought that Google will want to see a natural increase in the amount of content added to your site and a corresponding increase in the number of inbound links to your site?
@Russ Henneberry – I’d agree with that statement. Grow your site by consistently adding content, and grow your ‘unnatural’ links back at the rate mentioned above.
By coming at a site with this approach, you’ll have an advantage; you’ll be writing good content that will garner a few natural links, and those article submissions, etc won’t look so obvious. Terrific strategy.
Will, this is great info. It seems like the bottom line with Google is to develop and mirror natural behaviors. They want to supply search results that are truly what people are looking for.
It’s up to us to create content that people crave. And when we’re doing any automation we have to imitate human behavior.
Creating the kind of gravity that make people WANT to link to us (without us asking) is all about becoming a resource, and that points back to content.
@Steve Smart – You’re right, Steve. If you create terrific content that people want to share, the link building becomes a bit less of a priority.
Will is right and my comment to anyone is please do not use a link placement service that claims 100, 1000, etc. links for however much. It doesn’t matter it is scammy, spammy and junk for sure. You will crash and burn!