It’s now common knowledge that inbound links are ridiculously important to the success of your site. Receiving a link is a ‘vote’ in a search engine’s eyes, and now energy seems to be (necessarily) focused on how to obtain as many links as possible. But there is more to it than that, and the right amount of links, the right kind of links, is just as important and overlooked by eager newbies wanting a quick boost in rankings. It will take time and know-how to develop links more naturally and in such a way that you get the most bang for your buck.
But first to point out the obvious, without a decent, valuable site, your link building will be wasted. Search engines try and mostly do reward sites that are relevant to search terms, useful to visitors. So gaming the system without trying to truly have a worthwhile site will not work. It may work for a short time, but for longevity, you are still wise to focus on what the visitor wants and needs.
However, in this day and age you absolutely cannot ignore the massive amount of SEO work that must be done if you want to show up in search. Unless your site just naturally refills itself with content every few days, unless you are a rockstar in your industry and people just link to you all the time for fun, then you will have to manipulate your site to be what the search engines want too. And for most of us, it is just not all that natural to keep writing articles, more and more paragraphs of words. At some point it is just sheer nonsense, continuously adding content whether the visitor needs it or not. But alas, it must be done.
It is reality that the incoming links are an integral part of this manipulation of your campaign for the search engines. Your link building campain will include the natural links that occur by chance (or by link baiting, adding lots of content and press releases and viral marketing). And you should balance this with a large volume of small links and a handful of heavy duty links from higher PR pages, or from some EDU links or GOV links. The sites ranking high in results have plenty of links, most likely a portion of them are paid links, it is just reality.
Keep your link campaign well rounded, with a mix of inbound links from pages with high page rank, and even below yours. Vary the anchor text for your links. Also point links to internal relevant pages in addition to your home page. Take your time, space out your new incoming links. The crawlers will detect an unnatural spike. This is especially important for new sites. Links in content are still absolutely the best, seek these out in every creative way possible. Avoid bad neighborhoods where there are lots of spammy paid links to questionable sites.
And how to get all of this done? It is daunting, and the only way to do it right is to spend an enormous amount of time on it. This is why companies are hiring these things out, and focusing on designing their site for their visitor, letting the SEO worry about the rest.
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