You guessed it, this blog is about link building and will probably be a 2 part feature as this is the hardest aspect of SEO. Links are an important part of search engine optimisation both off page and on page. For this blog I am primarily going to talk about off page linking. There are currently no industry rules, except the rules the search engines decide, and this is constantly changing. There are a number of strategies to avoid as a general rule. First off gaining 4000 links in a week, oops! sounds good in theory but not in practice. This is like waving a red flag at a bull (Google).

This type of link building will often result in the search engine ignoring those links at best, and giving you a ranking penalty at worst. When you think about the comparison to the tortoise and the hare, like that analogy slow and steady win’s the race. When the search engines see your link development they want it to be natural, not like you’ve paid some cowboy money for 4000 links.
Also take it easy on linking if you’re a new site, and go for quality not quantity. Start too quick and you will receive the same penalty as above.

Next on the list is paid linking. Google is cracking down on this and a lot of what where once great SEO Companies, have felt the effects with sites getting banned and rankings dropping out of the top 100. The only type of link buying which is still permitted by the search engines is directory links, and this is a good way to build page rank. A good directory to submit to is yahoo’s, but it’s not cheap.

Next with reciprocal linking you give me a link, and I give you a link. This type of link is RUBBISH and out of date. It’s like the Labour party voting for the Conservatives, and the Conservatives voting for Labour - therefore the search engines disregard them.

Next Blog Commenting, spamming and forum spamming. This is the art of dropping links into comment within a blog and in the forum arena. This is great for link building as long as you don’t go over board and drop in link after link i.e spam. Although a lot of these systems will assign a no-follow automatically to these links, they will generate traffic for you as long as your comment is a valued one and interesting to users .