When you build a wall, you do it bit by bit, with the same kind of identical bricks until you have a lot of bricks that all look the same… presto, you have a wall. That’s building. My mate does that.

You can’t build links that way and EXPECT to win the ranking wars in Google as Google is actively fighting you. Your bricks kind of need to be different brick to brick.

There’s a thought out there. Get 200 or 300 or 400 links and you’ll rank. So it’s natural that you think I’ll buy some links from that mob (and I mean mob) for $200 and I’m sorted.

You’re not.

Those links are s*&t (sorry no other word to describe it). Depending on how good the search engine optimisation company is of course – there’s different varying colours of s*&t but generally speaking you stand in it when you open your email and it says:

We noticed you dont rank for any of your keyterms. We are an expert linkbuilding company…..

They’ll come from spammy blog and forum comments that might hurt your brand, or web hosting companies with an obvious paid link profile. Even if they are decent at their job – a competitor will just report you for buying links if you do it too much. It will stick out like a sore thumb you’re buying links and that’s against Google TOS.

Stop thinking about building links. Start thinking of promoting your useful content.

Here’s how I built links the past 2 months to the Hobo site.

First, I understand building links (YUK) is about relationships with real people and trying to get links from real sites.

  1. I refocused my internal links (I’m testing a few things)
  2. I created my
    1. SEO Guide For Beginners which Matt Cutts sphunn (V Cool) – a thanks to Edward Lewis of SEO Consultants who gave me the confidence to publish.
    2. a PDF of my SEO Guide (along with an email burst telling my subscribers and Linkedin buddies it was ready (latter, a bit spammy, sorry about that!)
    3. a free wordpress plugin that may conserve Google Pagerank
    4. a month of linkbuilding tips on my blog (about one a day – spending no more than 1/2 hour each article) – more for beginner subscribers to the blog than to garner links at this time.
    5. An online press release or two
    6. I sent out a couple of email requests for links to sites I thought would actually benefit by linking to a particular article on this site – no, really!
    7. Syndication (!) – I really don’t care who republishes my content if they link back
    8. I pointed out to a few people their blog rolls looked a bit thin without Hobo on it lol
    9. A couple of other minor things…. one of which was a mistake I’m reversing.
  3. I told the world about my content (and in doing so my online buddies) via Twitter (mainly – it costs nothing to promote my content or others) hoping they’d help me give it a push (as I do theirs – in fact I have been asking a lot of them lately… next month will be about helping them push their stuff – it’s all me, me, me at the moment it seems!)

I didn’t ‘build’ one anchor text rich link like ‘SEO Scotland‘ in there (well, until just then).

(I will go into all that above during the course of the month). I’m finished with all that 2005 seo crap – it’s depressing, not lucrative and in some cases, a total con, even if you do lose rankings on some narrow terms that are pure vanity.

The results were Wordpress itself linked to me, SEroundtable linked to me, SEOconsultants linked to me, Sphinn linked to me, Search Engine Land linked to me (a couple of times), I got a couple of links on PR7 and 6 pages, and I got a couple of blog post links out of the blue from buddies and people I’ve just became buddies with lol (not becuase they were buddies, because the content was worth a link and not just a Twitter). On top of that, Smashingmagazine.com and some Brazillian version of Techcrunch linked to posts that where over a year old that largely went unnoticed at the time. For a small company in Greenock, Scotland, that’s a lot of attention. I also got links from some other really authorative seo sites (I’ll reciprocate later).

As a result, my subscription count has went from @1,500 in a month or so to nearly 3,000 which will make the whole process a lot easier next time. Oh, I got a lot of traffic too and I’ve been asked to do a couple of guest posts on blogs I read which is V cool. That will help in the future too.

What did I do? – I just helped people out with some free stuff that helps them achieve their own goals in the hope similar minded folk will help me to achieve mine. Easy. I created content and I told people about my site:

Tell the world about your site. Google

It’s clearly not rocket science but it takes a lot of effort.

(I even got to chat briefly with a Google Spam guy (Not MC) who wished me luck with my SEO Book) :)

This post might seem a little serve serving – appologies for that.

I just wanted to ensure this month I said Stop ‘building links’ and Start promoting your site. It’s easier and more rewarding.

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