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Link Building Do’s and Don’ts

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

Link building is one of these areas of website marketing that has become mysterious to many but at the end of the day there are some very frowned upon approaches along with some link building techniques that are strongly encouraged.

Below are some link building dos and don’ts to consider:

Articles Marketing:

Link Building Do: Write good strategic industry specific articles surrounding topics that have not been beaten into the ground by your entire industry.

Link Building Don’t: Pay someone overseas to write 500 articles for you to dump into the search results thinking they are going to generate anything valuable for your business.

Press Release Marketing aka Online Publicity:

Link Building Do: Pick company newsworthy topics to write about and announce to your community using industry trusted distribution resources with some embedded links into the body of your press release.

Link Building Don’t: Don’t launch a press release every week announcing useless mundane information that is never going to get picked up by other bloggers. The point is to have other websites relay the information in your press release on their website spreading your links.

Social Media Marketing:

Link Building Do: Build your community by asking questions, engaging your audience and providing useful knowledge and information your surrounding community can use to strengthen themselves as a business.

Link Building Don’t: Don’t launch a Twitter account and self promote the heck out of your business. You will never build a community and strengthen your external marketing and link building if all you do is promote yourself, your services and your products.

Online Video Marketing:

Link Building Do: Come up with creative online video that will spread amongst your community and have your audience and colleagues take your video and spread it through the blogosphere.

Link Building Don’t: Launch a screen cast type of video everyday with extremely poor editing in order to try and dominate search results. You might get a few views but the chances of someone actually taking the video and linking to it are slim to none.

When it comes to building your links online it might seem easy to try and cut corners in order to manipulate the search results. The reality is that good ole fashion marketing techniques applied to new age search marketing efforts will help you ultimately grow your business online.

17 Responses to “Link Building Do’s and Don’ts”

  • Motyka Johnson says:
    August 20, 2010 at 3:49 pm

    Thanks for the great article, and I particularly like your advice about building communities by asking questions, engaging audiences and providing useful knowledge and information.

    What is your take on the practice of using a “links” page- the one page on a website that is basically a list of links to other websites?

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    August 20, 2010 at 6:36 pm

    Hi Motyka,

    Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!

    I personally do not think links pages are useful these days as they provide a poor visitor experience, unless of course a business has personal relationships with partner companies, etc. Then it is no longer a links page it is now a true partner page! Oh yeah, Google I think gives out penalties for sites with links pages too… :)

    Thanks again & Take Care!
    Nick

  • Luk Meulebrouck says:
    August 21, 2010 at 2:31 pm

    Hi Nick,
    Do you seriously believe Google gives a penalty if you link to other sites? I always thought they encourage linking. After all, the web is not supposed to be an archipel of separate islands, but a city with interconnecting streets :-) .
    But of course, linking to a site doesn’t do any good for your own one. It’s when they link to your page, they share their PR with you.
    By the way, I couldn’t help sharing this one on my company FB page. It’s good info for newbies :-)
    Greetz, and keep up the good SEO work.
    Luk.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    August 23, 2010 at 4:29 pm

    Hi Luk,

    Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!

    The point is, linking is good ONLY if you have relationship with the company you are linking to…

    Thanks again,
    Nick

  • B.Shah says:
    September 9, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    Hi Nick,

    I really appreciate your research and sharing knowledge about Link building where you say “Google might gives out penalties sometimes for link-only pages?”

    As i am new in SEO, i was always wondering about the strategies most of the SEO analysts use for Link building and also most of the directories needs reciprocal links which eventually lands the analysts creating these kind of links only pages.

    so the question always arose in mind was what’s the need of these and how can they justify that?

    Thanks,
    Brijal

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    September 9, 2010 at 6:59 pm

    Hi Brijal,
    Thanks for reading and your comment!

    If you are brand new to SEO (other than reading my SEO newsletter and SEO blog :)

    I would recommend reading the following:
    Google SEO Info:
    http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

    Search Engine Guide
    http://www.searchengineguide.com/

    And the Add Me Blog:
    http://www.addme.com/blog/

    Best of luck!
    Nick

  • Darren says:
    October 7, 2010 at 7:04 pm

    Thanks again for the great recommendations! Right on in terms of the SEO for Social Media. The absolute worst way to start a social media presence is to just post useless info on repeat. Engage and Inform are important, but most is communicate and respond to your potential customers! great points!

  • mau the realtor guru says:
    October 7, 2010 at 8:50 pm

    Thanks Nick. I find this information very refreshing as most online traffic software pushers tells an opposite story. They always recommend outsourcing article writing and submitting them along with news releases and the works and the launching of videos often. This was very refreshing.

  • Horizon Holiday Cottages says:
    October 8, 2010 at 6:16 am

    Thanks for this helpful overview Nick; once the small business owner started down the road of link building and SEO, it is amazing how many offers will be received from those promising to build thousands of permanent links and write hundreds of articles. I have seen many articles published that have must have been created by such article spinning software where the content has been manipulated so many times that the article is no longer even coherent. I certainly would not want to leave a link to my website from such rubbish. I believe that you have, in many articles, shown us that reputable link building is a slow and laborious process.

  • Efi says:
    October 8, 2010 at 10:10 am

    Thank you for this great article which helped me immediatelly. Since last night, I started asking questions to my community and lead them to articles in our site and it’s working. They are responding more and more.

    So please, keep sending all these useful newsletters!!

    I have 2 questions:
    1) Can you explain a bit more the sedond “Press Release Marketing aka Online Publicity”, especially the part of “Link Building Do”. I m not sure if I understood exactly what you mean
    2) I understand the importance of the video. I have the scripts, I have the idea but I don’t have the technical skills. I also don’t have the budget for a production company or even for a freelancer. So I was thinking to get help from people that they already have a clue and I will discover some more alone. Do you have any link suggestions for creating a video?

    Thank you for your time

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    October 8, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    Hi Efi,
    Thanks for your kind words and for reading! :)

    I am happy to answer your questions:

    1. Writing newsworthy, press releases (or news/media release) about something that is relevant to the business. For instance a good press release topic, could be a launch of a new product, service, etc. Where it helps from a link building perspective is the links that you include in the release, when you send it out via a press release distribution service, such as PRWeb, PRLeap, 24×7 Press Release, etc.

    2. For a low cost option for creative of a video, take a look at Animoto or Pixability, both different low cost types of video creation services.

    I hope this helps!

    Take Care,
    Nick

  • Chris says:
    October 11, 2010 at 11:03 am

    Once again your advise has proved useful and I will try to put these do’s into practice.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    October 12, 2010 at 1:06 pm

    Hi Chris,
    Thanks for reading, I am happy that these link building tips really helped…

    Thanks again & Take Care,
    Nick

  • Denzil@Technical Copywriter says:
    November 9, 2010 at 7:16 pm

    Very useful tips here Nick. May I ask you a question? I am new to Internet Marketing and have developed a strategy, one of the points being to develop backlinks. How long does it take for Google to take notice of backlinks? I keep checking but as yet (one week down the road), my number of backlinks seems not to be growing.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    November 9, 2010 at 7:57 pm

    Hi Denzil,

    If you are looking at Google webmaster tools, it may take a few days to a month to fully update…I would just keep checking!

    Take Care!
    Nick

  • zaira says:
    December 20, 2010 at 3:52 am

    Excellent post! I’m reading it now and learning a lot.

  • Affordable Link Building says:
    January 24, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    Surely. Link building is one of the most important among the SEO tools that have been accepted by the search engines.

    Thank you

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