Every day we talk to clients and potential clients who are trying to build their business exposure through Search Engine Optimization. In most every case they come to us after trying to do their own SEO, only to find that their rankings suddenly started to fall.

These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid:

1. Reciprocal Linking – Yes.. it is great for cross promotion and comradery among bloggers and other sites, but it serves very littly, if any, purpose for SEO. If I give you an apple, and you give it back to me, we net 0.
2. Directory Submissions – Unless it is a high quality directory, you’ll most likely be establishing a relationship with spammers, and do much more harm than good.
3. E-zine articles – If you want to write content to increase your SEO, write it for your own site. The rss feeds from E-zine articles get scraped by spammers, and duplicated thousands of times across the web. Next thing you know, it looks like YOU duplicated the same article and put it out everywhere, and YOU are the spammer.
4. Excessive Submissions to Social Bookmarking Sites, Commenting on Blogs and Forums – ONLY do this if you have legitimate comments and stories. Otherwise, your site is reported as spam.
5. Links that cost less than $10 – If someone tries to sell you links for less than $10, they are most likely going to do all of the things that I just said not to do, and charge you for it. Then you have to hire someone to clean it up. 🙂
6. Rapid Linkbuilding – If you are using legitimate means to linkbuild, but do it too quickly, the search engine Gods feel cheated, and you will get banned from the search engine.. (your site doesn’t even get indexed anymore)

Obviously the overarching concept here is that if you want to do linkbuilding, you should do it legitimately by having a great site with great content. If you need some help, let us know.  If you want to try linkbuilding on your own, we recommend Blogsvertise… please be sure to use this affiliate link so we get credit for telling you about their great service!

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