Apparently it is here to stay: the power of the inbound link. Google values the inbound link in a powerful way. It’s a vote for your site, and without the votes, you don’t get that Googletrust and you don’t get that ranking. Getting the right mix of links is crucial, and how to even get these links is a mystery to most, and a pain in the rear to the rest of us. But with the right effort and knowledge, you can create a logical mix of inbound links that will indicate to search engines that your site is valuable.
Now in the long term, your focus on having a visitor friendly site, with material that a visitor wants to see, will be rewarded by the search engines. And of course increase conversions and loyalty. So be careful not to lose the perspective of your customer, your visitor, and make your site what the public wants.
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.
So accepting that you will have to manipulate your marketing plan for the search engines as well as visitors, you will embrace this intimidating link building campaign. You must get links. Gotta do it. No getting around it. And link baiting, enticing people to link to you by offering rich valuable content, or free widgets, or press releases, is a big part of it. But baiting is just not enough for most sites, you will have to do active building the hard way: one at a time or buying them. You will want lots of smaller links, and a few big boys. Some links in content from a high PR will work magic on most sites, especially mixed in with the average links. A few authority links such as EDU links or GOV links will complement your smaller links and give you a big boost.
The basics for a good link campaign: Well rounded, and well timed. A variety of links from numerous sources, some from authority sites and some from new sites and blogs. Watch not to build too many too fast, a spike will be detected. Keep anchor text relevant but varied. Use internal pages as well, especially high content pages. Links embedded in relevant content are hands down the most valuable, strive for as many as possible.
Sounds like a lot of work? The best link building is just plain time consuming, there is no way around it, and more and more companies are hiring it out in some fashion.