Link Building – Effective but Not Necessarily Efficient

A common piece of advice is to build links to other sites to place well in search engines.  While there’s no doubt that quality links to your site will improve your rankings, getting those links can take some significant effort.  Advanced sites looking for slight edges definitely need to build links, however, entry-level sites to SEO likely have more effective uses for their time.

Most site owners receive the automated emails asking for link exchanges.  As you might guess, these tactics are extremely ineffective.  The alternative is segmenting by market or competitors and making inroads into targeted sites.  While that is effective, it takes a lot of time.

There are some automated ways of generating links like directory submissions.  While these are typically not the most relevant sources they will influence your website ranking.

The best tactic for most sites without dedicated SEO resources is link building over time.  Make link building a part of your regular business activity.

• Talk to current partners about linking to your site.
• Make sure any chamber or association you belong to has a listing that links to your webpage.
• Any content or articles created should include a by line link to your site.
• Link any external listings to individual pages that pertain to the listings topic.

When link building is built into activities that you are already doing, it doesn’t take a lot of extra effort and builds extremely relevant and targeted linking.