There has been many discussions on whether links will hurt your site or help it. If you do it right it will help the site, but done wrong it will hurt the site. Of course I have heard horror stories that people claim the links is what caused their site to fall from Google grace or people that link must be flying under the Google radar and one day they will get caught. The thought that pops up in my head is what did they do wrong. Maybe I am used to doing it right that I do not fear linking.

Google

For Google to find a site, either someone has to submit the site to Google or Google finds a link on another site to that site and indexes the site. Hmmmm, but isn't linking suppose to be bad??? In the beginning of Google, it relied on links from one site to another to fill its database with sites to present to the user of the search engine. Even blogs like this one rely on links to give some Google juice to a site. Blog is useless for positioning a site without a link. A link is a link is a link.

Relevant sites

What is a relevant site? In my definition, it is either a site that is local to your area or industry related.

• Local sites are excellent to trade links with. Make sure both sites have the local address on the sites for Google to pick up.
• Industry related sites, like real estate, are great as well. I will stick with US and Canada. Going out to UK or Bulgaria will lose its relevance because of the distance.
  

How many and how fast

This is an important part. If a thousand links are pointed to your site overnight, Google will know it is not natural and you can be penalized or all the links will be useless. If you have a one page site and a thousand links pointed to the site, even if over a period of time, that will be obvious as well. Nice thing about using links in blogs is that you have to write content to go along with the link. The ratio of content to links is always in check. If you write them yourself then there is no way you will write a thousand blogs, for a thousand links, overnight. The idea is to build links over a period of time and if you have link pages then make sure to add a description to the site to add content to the page as the links build up. The ratio of links to content is important. Building up content on the site while building up links is important as well. I do not have an exact ratio to quote, use best judgment.

Why does not every SEO company offer it?

• It is time consuming
• It is expensive to collect potential link partners
• They do not have a clue on the proper way to conduct linking
• It is easier and lucrative to conduct blog coaching. They can regurgitate the same thing over and over and over.

There are some SEO firms out there that will try to convince as many people that it does not work simply because they cannot sell it themselves. Think about it, if you knew it worked you would ask for it and they would not be able to sell it to you, lost business. Don't drink the cool-aid (Jamestown).

Conclusion

When in doubt, take your time in link building. Build up some nice content first. Neighborhood page are a great way to build up content. Blog as well, both are a great combo for a one two punch. Finally, do not drink the cool-aid.

Labels: link building, links, real estate links