by SEO Design Solutions
Posted on July 1, 2010
A few years ago link building was the rave of the day and probably the single most used and abused SEO strategy - people were swapping links, buying links, selling links, and breathing links.

Is link building the sole factor that the search engines take into account?
And for good reason - the majority of the search engines tended to award the websites that had most backlinks, no matter how these links were obtained.
Of course, this led to the development of many shady link building techniques and when irrelevant sites were always holding the top positions on the search engines, the teams that were running these search engines knew that it was time to change and improve their algorithms.
Does link building still work?
What is the situation right now? Does link building still work?
Yes, it does! Link building is still a great SEO strategy, but only when done wisely and in a natural manner. Today, the search engines tend to "count" trusted links and completely ignore links that have been gained in a questionable manner; of course, no matter how smart their algorithms are, they are still far from being perfect and there are still ways to exploit their weaknesses.
Is link building the sole factor that the search engines take into account?
Unfortunately, we might only guess the exact ways that the search engine algorithm's work, but link building is not the only way to shoot your site to a top search engine position.
There are quite a few other factors that are likely to have an impact and some of them are the quality of your content, the age of your website, the loading speed of your pages, and the use of pop-ups or flash, among others.
It should also be noted that not all links are created equal - most webmasters and SEO experts believe that links that come from trusted sites with content similar to your own, are valued higher.
The same applies to links that are found by the search engine spiders higher in a page's HTML code and internal links have always had less weight that external ones.
Other link building techniques that used to work pretty well in the past like posting comments on blogs with link, pointing back to your site, or having your site in your forum's signature are pretty much obsolete now, at least as far as giving weight to your website's search engine position goes.
The search engines are trying to adopt an advanced semantic search formulas that give relevant results to every search, but until they succeed, the link building will still be a very important part of a good SEO strategy.
A common mistake that is made by new webmasters is to expect instant benefits from building backlinks - as already mentioned older sites are typically more trusted and so are older links.
However, even if you launch a brand new site and manage to build good number of quality links, you are likely to benefit from your efforts sooner or later. As long as you don't try to "fool" the search engines with any "dodgy" techniques and all the backlinks pointing to your site are natural, you should see a good increase in the number of targeted visitors that you are getting.
This guest post was written by Ronni Rebsdorf: Ronni is the owner of Rebsdorf Media a Danish SEO company providing on page optimization and link building for customers around the world.

Is link building the sole factor that the search engines take into account?
And for good reason - the majority of the search engines tended to award the websites that had most backlinks, no matter how these links were obtained.
Of course, this led to the development of many shady link building techniques and when irrelevant sites were always holding the top positions on the search engines, the teams that were running these search engines knew that it was time to change and improve their algorithms.
Does link building still work?
What is the situation right now? Does link building still work?
Yes, it does! Link building is still a great SEO strategy, but only when done wisely and in a natural manner. Today, the search engines tend to "count" trusted links and completely ignore links that have been gained in a questionable manner; of course, no matter how smart their algorithms are, they are still far from being perfect and there are still ways to exploit their weaknesses.
Is link building the sole factor that the search engines take into account?
Unfortunately, we might only guess the exact ways that the search engine algorithm's work, but link building is not the only way to shoot your site to a top search engine position.
There are quite a few other factors that are likely to have an impact and some of them are the quality of your content, the age of your website, the loading speed of your pages, and the use of pop-ups or flash, among others.
It should also be noted that not all links are created equal - most webmasters and SEO experts believe that links that come from trusted sites with content similar to your own, are valued higher.
The same applies to links that are found by the search engine spiders higher in a page's HTML code and internal links have always had less weight that external ones.
Other link building techniques that used to work pretty well in the past like posting comments on blogs with link, pointing back to your site, or having your site in your forum's signature are pretty much obsolete now, at least as far as giving weight to your website's search engine position goes.
The search engines are trying to adopt an advanced semantic search formulas that give relevant results to every search, but until they succeed, the link building will still be a very important part of a good SEO strategy.
A common mistake that is made by new webmasters is to expect instant benefits from building backlinks - as already mentioned older sites are typically more trusted and so are older links.
However, even if you launch a brand new site and manage to build good number of quality links, you are likely to benefit from your efforts sooner or later. As long as you don't try to "fool" the search engines with any "dodgy" techniques and all the backlinks pointing to your site are natural, you should see a good increase in the number of targeted visitors that you are getting.
This guest post was written by Ronni Rebsdorf: Ronni is the owner of Rebsdorf Media a Danish SEO company providing on page optimization and link building for customers around the world.
Take the first step towards higher rankings today and call SEO Design Solutions at 1 (312) 794-7883 to speak with a qualified SEO consultant. SEO Design Solutions specific service offerings include: link building services, custom SEO copywriting services, custom SEO web design, custom web development, social media and analytics making them a full-service SEO Firm.
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woody writes: @douglas - natural deep links? how do you get these naturally, were wrought iron gate designers and fitters so people won't naturally link to our inner pages unlike say a video hosting site.
7:47:08 Thu Jul 22 2010 CDT
Douglas writes: Thanks for wirting this..
Links are one method, you also need niche links, higher pr links and natural deep links.
10:06:09 Wed Jul 7 2010 CDT
Mark writes: Ronnie; I am new in this SEO game but I'm afraid I didn't see any new information in your article that I haven't seen 20 or 30 times before. Thanks for the effort.
10:59:45 Tue Jul 6 2010 CDT
John Emmett writes: Looks like everyones doing it. Thanks for the info.
5:41:10 Tue Jul 6 2010 CDT
Emma writes: Thanks for the info. :)
6:55:55 Fri Jul 2 2010 CDT
Andy writes: So, you've just written an article that says nothing of real value to anyone and included a link to your own sites in your article signature.
That's the real link building tip right there.
4:14:21 Fri Jul 2 2010 CDT
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