SEO Blog

Unfortunately, building links for a site was never intended to be easy. Yes, you can sign up for directories, submit articles, press releases and hubs, but the glean any value from them takes time. There’s no avoiding that.

This isn’t entirely accidental. It is a product of links being ascribed a value, not only in SEO terms but financial ones too (although you could argue these two are permanently interlinked anyway). The pay off often comes by way of content, which invariably takes a fair amount of time to generate, regardless of the quality levels you employ.

If link building could be done in minutes, we’d all have sites with millions of links. This would slowly undermine the algorithms and force tighter scrutiny from search engines. Essentially, it’s probably best that those who are clever with their link building strategies are rewarded more than those who treat them as quick, disposable commodities.

When you start a site, invariably you’ll have no links whatsoever. This puts you at a major disadvantage against all of your competitors. Unfortunately this isn’t a disadvantage that can quickly be overturned – certainly not through legitimate means.

Going after some straightforward links at the beginning can get the ball rolling. Write some articles, get them published across a number of directories and then watch your inbound links rise as a consequence. But you also have to  go after the big guns.

This means signing up for Google Places (plus the Yahoo and Bing equivalents of course), Dmoz and any other major directory. These strong links from authoritative sources will provide more sources for visitors and, just as importantly, give the search engine spiders the chance to come in and index your pages.

Of course this all takes plenty of that commodity we’re all so unhappy to surrender – time. But if you want your site to get noticed and have a search engine presence, then it is a necessary sacrifice. At least in these cases you should be almost guaranteed a link, albeit it may take time to confirm. However, the frustration can build later when you start finding it more and more challenging to find decent sources.

But SEO is often a frustrating process. To describe it as anything else would be optimistic at best. Links don’t just fall out of the sky, they take good content, social interaction and a fair amount of requests to secure. Keeping your standards high is usually a pretty good strategy though, particularly where natural linking is involved.

If you create content that others feel compelled to link to then half the battle is already won. These links appear natural to Google (probably because they are), so often have a higher value and so provide the greatest benefit to your SEO efforts. But again there’s no guarantees. You could create something amazing and watch it get completely ignored. Sometimes no amount of marketing can help – it can become a game of chance.

When you actually go out and request a link, sign up for a directory or distribute some content, you have more of a guaranteed source – hence why this often forms the backbone of many link building strategies still. By removing the chance you lower your chances of failure, but also attract weaker links. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

Okay, so you can outsource to some far flung outreach and get hundreds of directories and other links generated, but this is flimsy at best. Time may be saved, but you’ll end up spending plenty of money and getting results that are difficult to monitor and may have no positive effect whatsoever.

Being social, building communities and growing your brand online can help to get more traffic and encourage links. Again, it won’t guarantee success, but by having that online presence you stand a better chance of having your SEO efforts benefit as a consequence.

So that’s about it, links aren’t easy to get and nor should they be. We all have the tools to tick the basic boxes; however, getting to that next level – the high PR, .edu and .gov’s of this world – is a challenge. Without that obstacle, SEO would be far too easy and rankings would lose any semblance of real order.