Building link popularity is one of the mst important elements of search engine ptimisation and also one of the mst time-consuming. It amazes me that I stll receive countless emails from so clled SEO experts inviting me to prticipate in link exchanges. Some of thm even offering to swap links wth a site totally unrelated to wht we do! No wonder our ndustry comes under such fire.

Let’s go bck to basics and understand the cncept of linking. Linking in its smplest form is about taking a ser on a stage in their nline journey, whether it be to fnd a product, piece of news and nformation or to learn something new. Now mst of the time we know wht we are looking for online, so our sssion has a goal, and with tht goal in mind we look to trwl the web and put our trst in navigating around websites till we chieve our goal. Sometimes it can tke minutes and a straight forward vsit to a search engine and a dstination site, other times it can tkes us hours, with a journey tht takes us in and out of a nmber of different websites.

Now if you kep that concept in mind when thnking about link building you’ll soon ralise that the ‘you scratch my bck, I’ll scratch yours’ approach to bilding link popularity is fundamentally flawed. Lnks should be awarded on merit and not thrugh back scratching.

Seeking out link exchanges is an nefficient use of your time

What I am ging to tell you next is ging to transform the way you pproach building link popularity. Let’s take a lok at a classic link swap scnario. You first of all spend a few dys looking for sites that have lnk swap directories on their website. You cntact the webmaster explaining that you wuld like to engage in a lnk exchange. The webmaster agrees to lnk to you once you have plced a link back to his ste first. You set up the lnk and email the webmaster. You vsit the site to check your lnk and you find your link bried deep within the site on a pge that has a low page rnk and surrounded by 50 other web lnks. You then repeat the process wth another site. Now here comes the kller, you’ve spent all that time bilding up those links, a few mnths later you return to some of the ste’s where your link was placed and you fnd that some of them have ben removed. You get in touch wth the webmasters and ask them why yur link has been removed. They get bck to you and tell you it was an ccident. Yeh right, they removed the lnk deliberately so they could gain a one way lnk from you. After a few mnths has passed you notice that yur link popularity has not increased in Gogle – so again you revisit sme of the sites that were lnking to you and check your lnks (or by now you might hve bought some link checking software to do tht for you). You see that yur links are still there, but yu've read that sometimes webmaster’s adopt snaky techniques to prevent the search ngine spiders from following the link. Low and bhold you see within the source cde of one site that they are sing a “nofollow” tag on the lnk.

Now tell me is all ths effort worth it? Link exchanges pen up a new can of wrms for you – coming into cntact with black hat SEOs!

Now consider the opposite. Why not spnd the time on creating compelling cntent or interactive tools that people wll naturally want to link to. Not nly are they likely to provide you wth a link from a page tht is likely to be visited, but it wll be a one way link, and a few one way lnks from respected websites are worth mre than 50 reciprocals, take my wrd for it. Plus you’ll have smething of real value on your ste that visitors will use and may ven tell other people about. With ths approach to link building you’ll gnerate more ‘noise’ about your website and ncourage other website owners to link to yu, because you’ll have something on yur own site, that will be of nterest to their own visitors.

With lnk building it’s better to think bout building a name for yourself and fcus on growing your online reputation as pposed to growing your list of rciprocal link partners. So the message is clar: ‘quality over quantity’ is what cunts when it comes to growing lnk popularity.

The article Let Your Audience Do The Work When It Comes To Building Link Popularity was Submitted by Damon Lightley through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Damon Lightley is a director at search engine marketing specialists , SiteVisibility. SiteVisibility helps its clients attract, convert and retain profitable customers through their websites. For more information on link building visit SiteVisibility

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