Link Building - the difficulty of building links in the modern world

A core part of any search engine optimisation campaign is link building. Every website will need links in order to rank well, and they will need them at both a certain quality level and also a certain quantity. For example, if you are running a cosmetic clinic, you may well be needing lots of links with the words hair loss in order to help you bring customers into your clinic. So how do you find decent links through the internet?

Well this is the real question. If you have time to find legitimate websites, contact each of them individually, respond to those that do respond, then cut a deal that they are happy with (either an advert, or a trade or just pay them for the link), then brilliant. This is a long drawn out process however, and the time it takes to do this means that actually by the point that you have your link, it has "cost" you a massive amount in time to get that link - far more than just buying a directory entry from BOTW or joeant.

So then we move logically away from link finding to buying directory links. So which directorys links is it worth buying? So you purchase the first really legitimate 10 links on the list, and then you find that you are fast running out of directory entrys that you can buy that are actually trusted. It's all very well having money to spend, but how do you spend it well? Which directories out of the hundreds out there are actually worth getting. You quickly find that many of them have been devalued. So instead you decide to swap links.

You start trading links. Thats when you realise that reciprocal linking is not only really easy to trace, but is now ignored by google. So doing a direct link swap does nothing at all. So you go to blog posts.

That's when you stumble accross an article about pay per post, the blog post company that went from having an empire to having nothing when google descovered their blog network, and reduced to page rank of every single blog in their entire network to nothing, destroying their business.

So what do you do? If you can find a trustworthy company offering link building services then all well and good, your problems are solved; but trying to navigate the minefield that is link building in the modern world is tough. More than that, it is just so difficult to know what will work and what won't.