We all know, as SEO’s, how important getting links are and how they play a major role in influencing your rankings in search engine’s. The main issue some search engines are trying to sort out is, how many of those links are actually “natural” and how many of those are manipulated by link builders or webmasters? If you have a good quality site with quality material, other sites in your niche should link to you regardless right?

Even though the number of quality links to your site is vital for your rankings, in my opinion, more time should be spent on controlling the content of your site and this should start immediately from the presentation of your site. Few things to consider with your existing or new site:

1/ Design - Make sure it looks professional or at least aligned with the theme of your target market.
2/ Structure - Is your site easily crawled by search engines? More importantly, would a visitor find the navigation confusing? Is the content easily accessible by visitors. Also consider what you want above the fold. No point putting relevant content towards the bottom of your page.
3/ Content - Do you have something different to offer to visitors? Have other sites got this content already or can you do a better job? Would the information be more comprehensive?
4/ Freebies - Surfers love freebies regardless of what market your in. This can be done later, but have some link baiting ideas in mind.

Some Negatives About Manipulative Link Building

I always like to build websites keeping long term profitability in mind and link building these days is not a straight forward exercise. Emailing or contacting other sites whether be for a link exchange, business agreement or other partnership relations, in most cases, you have to pay a fee or do something for the other party before they actually link back to you. And in most cases, these partnerships are only for a certain time frame (6 months, maybe 1 year). My point is, even if you can get a lot of links by buying or negotiating deals, many of these links will come off their sites eventually.

That said, it doesn’t mean you don’t do link building, cause if its done correctly, it can be a worthwhile investment.

Build Links Without Link Building

Back to the initial points about web design, structure, content and freebies. You need to ask yourself: if you were visiting your site, would you link to it? Would you come back everyday to see what’s happening on that site? Once the design is perfected, having fresh content will play a huge role, not only for algorithms but also lets visitors know that you are up to date with information. Adding value to visitors should always come first before optimizing for search engine. Now this doesn’t mean you go out and get a flash designer and make your site outrageously non-seo friendly. There’s a fine line between customizing your site for viewers or customizing your site for search engines, but I do believe you can satisfy both parties.

Search engine, particularly Google, will continue to strive for an algorithm that drives relevant and quality information to people when they search for particular keywords. The truth is, at the moment, link building is necessary. It will take a bit of time before algorithms will effectively be able to determine manipulated links from the real links (where people actually do link to your site cause they like it). Continue your link building efforts but also keep the long term goals in mind. Quality content will always attract more links than someone building links manually.