Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.
Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.
That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.
Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle
The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.
Creating Link Value
A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.
The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.
There are in fact very few places where natural links occur, other than blogs. Even “The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized” is, in my view, an understatement. Get on the blogosphere’s radar and rankings will inevitably improve…along with direct traffic from blog readers.
Natural links are key to ranking well, I have found. It is true I don’t know of short cuts to be successful this way so many are not interested. But create valuable content and take some effort to market yourself and then count on others appreciating your content is the model I have used. It works. But it can take a long time and you need to focus on creating truly worthwhile content.
The blog points are good and I think another importance of blogs is people are far far more likely to link to blogs than other sites. So having blogs helps gain natural links.
I agree, the best way to gain “natural” links is to create good quality content and add lists of resources to your blogs or websites. People will start linking to your website.
I agree that improving search engine visibility can be achieved using methods such as natural link use. Creating a content and then use that content to make people interested in your site is the idea that works in my opinion. The worst thing that we can do trying to stay visible is adding links to some unknown or suspicious sites or catalogs. It is also not very pleasant to send spam via email or put spammy comments with no sense at all.
Natural links are the key to success and the content is the most powerful tool of getting quality links which is generally called link baiting.
These links are more likely to bring quality traffic to your site and improving visibility over major search engines.
Things should be done in natural way to stay for long in the market.
You have a good point out there but I think that one has to realize as well that just by writing great content, they’re not going to get a bunch of links. It’s going to take a bit of marketing & promotion on the part of the blog owner to really get their blog to a level where there are enough people visiting the blog and wanting to link to it.
I’d say, blogging great content, promoting the content, regularly blogging and participating on other related blogs will help in building some natural links (over a period of time).
It is very true that if you include natural links to your web blog then the search engine will provide more page ranking to the blog and hence it will be displayed more frequently in the search results.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of any online business. It demands time and consistency, but without great content and real value it won’t mean anything. People can tell what the “real thing” is. I also agree that apart from good content you need to promote everything, or all your hard work yields nothing.