What Is Natural Link Building?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You hear it over and over again – be natural. Build links naturally. Let your link building efforts grow naturally. Make your inbound links appear natural. But what does it all mean?

Well, there’s really no such thing as natural link building. There is natural linking, but you can’t control that. Natural linking is the linking that other website owners do when you do something on your site that they like and link to it. You can just count those links as gravy. You didn’t pursue them. You didn’t ask for them. But you got them and they’ll benefit you.

But what about link building? It’s more profitable, really, to discuss the types of things you DON’T want to do. For instance,

• You don’t want to build all of your links at one time then stop
• You don’t want to go for long periods of time with no link building then all of a sudden go on a spree
• You don’t want to use the same anchor text for every inbound link to your site
• You don’t want to target just one kind of website
• You don’t want to get links only from high profile, high PR sites (or from low profile, low PR sites
• You don’t want to skip link building altogether

Link building is a necessity, but you don’t want to overdo it. It’s best to space it over time. Do a little this month then do a little next month and so on. When you pursue links from a variety of sources with no set pattern to them then you are more likely to establish links to look natural. But you don’t have to focus your energies on the looking natural part. Just don’t be a spammer and you should be fine.