I tend to be pretty long-winded, so coming up with a short post about link-building was a challenge I decided to undertake. Books have been written about link-building, but there are four very important guidelines that pretty much summarize the principles behind effective link-building.
- Links don’t just grow on trees. If a company promises to make links grow on trees, they are lying. Or wrong. Not every link is a good link, so you have to consider that relevant, important links are the only trees worth climbing. Am I mixing metaphors enough for you?
- It’s hard to market yourself without marketing yourself. I see this so often with my clients – they want to have tons of inbound links, but haven’t done any site marketing to actually create the links. Whether it’s a service like HARO for some PR, guest blogging, press releases, listing management, or other services, you have to market yourself. If you build it, visitors don’t automatically come.
- Be interesting. Great content creates great links. Don’t just “SELL” – be a thought leader. If you provide special, unique, detailed, inside information, you convince customers of your competence. Always be true to your brand, but you can be entertaining, fun, interesting and informative. Now, while I said in the last point that “if you build it they won’t necessarily come,” but if something is AWESOME, it often will get discovered, if you help it along.
- If it were easy, everyone would do it. If SEO and link building in particular were easy, every site would have a #1 listing. But the fact is, they don’t. It’s hard and it should be hard. Link-building is a rewarding challenge for every site owner and SEO firm, but when done right and done well, it is 100% worth it to see your site at the #1 organic spot.
