Link Building Best Practices

The lust for links has been a self-defeating philosophy that each year has cost many online business operators thousands of dollars (per business) in lost sales. – Michael Martinez, “Overcoming the Heiro Effect in SEO”

I have to agree with Michael on this on this one. Link building shouldn’t be about collecting as many links as you can…it should be about developing relationships with other niche specific and authority sites. This collecting of any and every cheap link you can find is not SEO, it’s link baiting.

Link baiting…just another form of Web site marketing. If you’re relying on link baiting to improve your search engine rankings, you’re pursuing an inefficient methodology.

Yes, link popularity is one factor in search engine optimization, but it’s not the end all, be all of SEO. Now, when you are looking to acquire links from other sites, here’s where you should be looking:

• Authority Directories – DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, GoGuides.org, are just some of the authority sites out there that make valuable link partners. Some directories may charge a fee to be listed but these links that you pay for are worth it. Note: be careful…some directories may claim to be authority sites when they’re really just link farms, so do your research before paying for a link.
• Vendor Sites – get links from the people you do business with every day. Whether they’re suppliers who are providing the products you sell, or your ecommerce partners who are selling the products you manufacture, these sites are relevant link partners.
• Online Press Releases – Publish relevant news about your niche industry, and other sites will send their visitors to your press release to read it. Now, these links may or may not last over a long period of time as newer news takes your press release’s spot, but it’s definitely a good tactic for building short term links to your site.

Remember, you want to build links that will drive quality traffic to your site, not just for the sake of search engine optimization.