Every SEO specialist knows that the numbers and quality of links to your site are one of the most important factors in determining how your page will rank in searches. The problem is that most web developers are not well equipped with the most current knowledge or practices in link building. So how do you get these great links.
The absolutely best way to get links to your site is for other people to build them! If you have a great product or service, then others should blog about or create links to your site. This is an awesome way to promote your website. Some of this will likely happen, but it is usually not enough to boost you into the stratosphere where your website belongs.
Next, you can write articles which contain links to you own site and post them on a service like Squidoo.com. This will create fairly high quality links, but it is very time consuming.
A lot of people talk about building a ton of links to their site for SEO purposes as if it is something the site owner or developer should do themselves. If you have a ton of free time this is a great idea but if you are on a deadline you will likely find that this is where the project gets shorted.
Finding the right link building team is the trick. There are a lot of bad companies out there that will charge you to build useless links to your site. However just because there are several bad offers out there, it does not mean that there are not some good ones as well. My team of Search Engine Geeks is in the process of investigating several of the largest link building firms to discern who is doing the best job right now.
Some of our criteria.
- Need to understand the uselessness of rel=’nofollow’ links
- Need to understand the dangers of link farms or obvious circles
We want, at a minimum, both of these topics discussed on their site. If they don’t get this much then it will likely be a waste of time working with them.
Rel = nofollow is maybe the most dangerous issue here. Here is a scenario: The website owner goes to a link building firm and requests 300 links to be built to his site. The firm builds them and then sends an email to the owner with a list of the pages where the links exist. The owner spot checks several of the pages and, sure enough, there are links there, and if you click them they lead to the desired page. But weeks on months go by and there are no results. The problem is that the links were built on sites that have rel=nofollow set for external links. Google basically ignores these links and they offer little or no benefit to the website owner.
Is this really happening? You bet! We run several blogs that these firms have found and we are getting 10-20 comments per day. I am fairly sure that most if not all of them are spam. However I continue to approve the comments (all expect the most spammy sounding ones) as it is giving my blog fresh content for Google to look at. However all of those blog entries are doing no one any good at all (except me the website owner) as they have the rel=nofollow in the anchor tag.So over time we are going to search out a firm that knows what they are doing and work with them to help promote the sites that we build.
