Common Sense Approach to Link Building?

[kalell1983]

Does anyone think that if you build a very high quality site no matter what the topic making it as good as it could possibly be in it's market, surely other sites and people will do the link building for you. I have spent many hours covering the web reading articles writtern on link building and sometimes some of them just come across as a bit desperate.

Wiki as an example, they have massive amounts of traffic per day, they are a complete non profit site ( apart from donations ) and from what I can see their bottom line is overall quality and distinction.

It just seems to me that their is still a few users out there looking for the quick fix to link building.

Love to hear other people thoughts on this.

[SEOsamurai]

agree, people refer high quiality sites.

[wheel]

surely other sites and people will do the link building for you.

That's up for debate. Personally, I completely disagree. I have hundreds to thousands of backlinks, and if you remove the scrapers and other junk, I don't think I've got a single backlink I didn't chase down myself.

Others are of the attitude that if you create good content, they will come.

My response to that is that if you're going to get the links naturally anyway, then you'll get even more links if you actively go looking.

Just be careful that you're not doing the 'if I build it they will come' as an excuse.

[kalell1983]

I completely agree with you "wheel" the only real way to create links is do it yourself. I have myself aquired a few naturally links over time that i had nothing to do with. It just seems to me most of time their is a knock on effect with links. One place says aquire high quality links. Other establised sites won't link out and the one's that do use a no follow.

[piatkow]

1. Good quality content
2. Market your site.

Your site needs to be known. If you have the content and can get it known direct to the public then a dedicated link building campaign is probably redundant.

[Jane_Doe]

I get links for new sites but for most of the older sites I just rely on them getting links on their own. Probably around 90% of the links to my sites are unsolicited. I think in the future the search engines will use more sophisticated methods of ranking than back links, so it is best to have sites now that people will link to on their own as it means they are probably also attracting other quality signals that may help rankings in the future.

[ken_b]

surely other sites and people will do the link building for you.

Do you have that much time? It can happen, but it isn't quick.

And "not chasing links" is not the same as "not promoting" a site.

It took a nearly year before the search engines found a link to my site somewhere and started sending me any visitors. By the time I joined WW the site was about not quite 17 months old and was getting about 20,000 pageviews a month.

I didn't ask for a link for nearly the first 4 years my site was online, by which time my page views were closing in on 1,000,000 a month point. Even then, after the 4 years, it was another member here who did a bit of link building for me and got maybe 20 links for me as a kindness (I don't recall the exact number), but I did and do appreciate the kindness, that is the only "link building" I've ever done or had done for my site.

Today, at near the 10 year mark, Yahoo! says I have about 8,500 hundred inbound links. I'd guess that at most 2,000 - 2,500 of hose are valid and very related links and the rest are from scrapers.

So where did the good links links come from?

Well as I said, not chasing links is not the same as not promoting the site.

I attend a lot of relevant events and talk to folks about our common interests. In the course of those conversations I sometimes mention my site.

Eventually that led some of the event organizers and attendees to visit and link to the site. And the link count grew from there. Well there's more to it than that, but that is how it got started.

So yeah, it can be done, but it can take a lot of time.

All of which is probably a lot harder to do today than it was 10 years ago.

When I started paying attention to the search engines (after I joined this forum) a 3 word search query where I'd get a little traffic seldom showed more than 100,000 results.

I just ran a sample of those similar searches and none of them showed less than 1,000,000 results, several were in the 30,000,000 + range for an unquoted 3 word term/phrase.

That has to make it a lot tougher, so waiting for a significant number of volunteer links might take a little longer.

[JS_Harris]

Common Sense Approach to Link Building?

Write top notch original and useful articles, follow good SEO practices such as using accurate and descriptive titles on pages stored within a solid internal link structure and let the links come naturally.