So we have all heard of “Link Building” and have been told it is necessary for SEO.

In this blog I will offer my opinion on Linkbuilding, but first we must identify what linkbuilding is.

“Link Building” quite simply is a link from an external site to your website. It can be from within your site to another part of your site, but for today we will just talk about external sites. The external sites can be anything from another website in your industry to a complete random website or perhaps a web directory.

When creating a link to your website the actual link should be the keyword you are targeting, ie if you sell dog kennels and your company name is ABC Dog Kennels and website is (http://www.abcdogkennels.com)  your link may look like this ‘ Dog Kennels – ABC Dog Kennels for all your dog kennels needs ‘. In this example the actual link is your keyword and the description shows the user a brief understanding of the site the link will take them to.

Now the problem is people exploited this fact in recent times and created several hundreds if not thousands of links to directories. These extra links historically played a huge part in your website rankings, but the search engines soon caught on to this, after all they don’t want websites manipulating the search engine results.

So is Linkbuilding important yes or no?

While it doesn’t play as much part in SEO as it did before, there is still a need to have your site linked on another site.

The things to look out for and avoid are the following

a) Websites that charge you to place a link on them are generally not very good (except a few ie Best of the web, Yahoo directory etc)

b) Websites that have no relevance to your industry ie having a link on a car mechanic website to a dog kennel website.

As we like to say at TopRankings design your content for the end user and not the search engines!

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