Link Building Strategies

I believe that Link building is an artform that is being widely abused. I see a lot of people out there that seem to think how high your Page Rank is decides how credible your site is.
Page Rank is decided by Google based upon a variety of factors and one of the largest factors is how many other websites link to yours. Having a site link to you is in effect a vote for your site is how the saying goes. The more people that vote for your site the more popular you must be is the line of reasoning. The more popular you are the higher your page rank from a scale of 0 to 10.

There are two ways to achieve page rank. One is go out there and find high ranking pages to link from that are willing to put your link on their page, perhaps in exchange for a link somewhere provided from them to your site. Or, as in three-way link building, I'll give you a link to a different site than the site I am asking you to link to so no one will know for sure that we have "exchanged links".
But now, it seems that everyone in the SEO business seems to think that having high PR is the way to win the Internet game. (Web-SEM has an overall PR4 on it's site in case you are wondering).

I say who cares? To me that business of gotta have PR is only to sell expensive services to a naive customer and I can prove it if you read on. We do help our customers get backlinks here in my company and we do a good job. But we are not looking for hundreds of high PR sites. We are looking for genuine sites with traffic, small, medium or large that will benefit our client. How it will benefit our client has nothing to do with PR but content and content alone. This is the way it was done in the old days before link farms, then link schemes, then link selling ever came along.

What I am selling on a site has to genuinely benefit your visitors. If it does then you might be inclined to put a link from my site onto yours. Because like me, you want to deliver the most relevant content to your visitors and if what my site has on it compliments what your site has without being in direct competition then it might be of value for us to exchange links. This way when a visitor comes to my or your site and finishes up with why they came in the first place or doesn't really find what they were looking for, maybe they will benefit from what I have. And so forth.

That's the honest way it was done in the past and that is the theory behind link building. If link building simply means getting on a page with PR 6 that is a page of 20 links then it really has no value and doubtful anyone is ever going to click on it. If the link is on a page with relevant content and your link is something that goes along with that content then it has value. Because when it comes down to it, the average consumer knows nothing about "Page Ranking". They only know what information they are looking for at the moment of their whim and whether or not you have it when they land on your site and more importantly, whether you are high enough in the search engine ranking that they can even find you in the first place..

And to further this argument about link building and Page Ranking schemes let me put it this way. Download the Google Toolbar and you can see the Page Rank of sites. You can go to google and get the toolbar or download the google tool pack (see the link below) and (it also includes some advanced software for backing up your computer and other nifty tools that I like).

My point about page ranking though is that if you do a search on google for any keyword you choose and you look at the top ten and look at the page ranking you will see sites with lower page rank above sites with higher page rank. So with the bottom line, page ranking has nothing really to do with the bottom line. If 81% of consumers find websites by going to a search engine (according to Forrester Research) then what does that say for the value of link building?

I am an SEO expert and I do a lot of shopping on the Internet too so I am also a consumer. And I use a browser with all kinds of built in "SEO" technology including Page Rank so I can evaluate my clients sites quickly and easily. And I live, eat and breath SEO and have been since 1991. But when I am a "consumer" do I look to see what the page rank of a site is that I have landed on from a search for something I was interested in? Never. And, as a consumer I rarely follow links except that they are internal links to a site because I am usually on a site because of an interest in its content not because another site got me there.
So, I think I am typical and my studies show that I am. This is how I want to help my client succeed.

I went to Google at the time of this writing and typed in the two words: competition racing. The first site link was a PR 3 and so was the second. Third was PR 4. Fourth was PR 5. Fifth site was PR 4. Sixth site was PR 3. Seventh was PR 6.

Is there any rhyme or reason to this? Actually there is. It's called SEO. And In my opinion, SEO is more important to my clients than PR because what really matters is where you are ranking in the search engines on which keywords that's where most of your traffic is going to come from not from having links on someones page somewhere. And obviously SEO is more important to Google than PR too. That's why a PR 3 page can rank above a PR 6 because its Googles vote saying they think the SEO of the page is more credible towards providing me relevant content related to my search than the PR 6 page is but the PR 6 page is credible enough to be on the list in that top ten just not above the PR 3 page. And as far as votes go, thats the one that really counts!

So stick with good old honest relevant content and proper SEO and in the long run you'll be the champion not because you are PR 7 and have used link building to get yourself linked all over creation.

For a free consultation about how my services can benefit you please call me directly toll free at
1-866-622-5710 from 10am to 6pm CST Mon-Fri or at
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