Natural v Unnatural Linking Strategies For SEO

Once upon a time in the land of SEO, lots of inbound links was all it took to get strong rankings on Google, at the time Google didnt really care where they came from just as long as you had lots of them! Here we're going to take a quick look at the differences between Natural and Unnatural links.

Let's start with the unnatural links:

Google knows the score and can sniff out poor strategy like the use of link farms and paid links. It was about a year ago when I was lucky enough to visit the Dublin Google HQ and had the benefit of attending a couple of question and answer sessions with a couple of dudes from California. We all talked about link brokers, text link ad companies, link farms and the like and Google pretty much told us all that they had a good handle on what people were doing in the market place, afterall they only need to Google something themselves to find out!! The bottom line is that using online services that promise to deliver a whole heap of links to your website isnt going to work in the long term - Google aint stupid. Going down the paid links route is also a non-starter, Googles own Matt Cutts has made things perfectly clear in that respect so if you want good results, think real hard before you go buying links.

As for natural links? How do I generate a load of quality inbound links to my website? Well here's a few pointers:

Directories - submit your website to good quality and directories specifically related to your own website.

Blogs & Websites - Get yourself in touch with some blogs and websites related to yours, find people who write about your topics. Offer to do them an article about something specific that their readers would find interesting. You need to be creative!!

Create link worthy content - Created content on your website that will make people link to you, that could be something really simple like a 'frequently asked questions', 'glossary' or perhaps some amusing article about your industry.

There's a whole heap of other stuff you could be doing and some of it quite time consuming if you're not 100% sure what you are supposed to be doing. Very often the most cost effective way of carrying out SEO type activity is to utilise the services of a good quality search marketing company like Gravytrain Limited.