Conclusion

In this chapter’s introduction, we noted that links are the main determinants of ranking behavior. If you do an okay job of link building and your competitor does a great job, your competitor’s business will grow at your expense. As a result, link acquisition strategies are an essential part of an effective SEO effort. Bear in mind that the best links are the ones that you would consider valuable even if there were no search engines. These are links that can deliver traffic to your site on their own, and they are the ones that are most likely to be seen as valuable by search engines in the long term.

You should also see link building as an ongoing activity. Each of the authors has seen cases where a brief focus on link accumulation brought returns that were squandered by abandoning the strategy. Unfortunately for these sites, they ultimately lost momentum and rankings to their competitors (the same ones they passed when they were actively building links), and it proved very difficult to catch up to them again.

Link building is not fundamentally different from public relations work. Your goal is to acquire positive citations across the Web. The big difference is the technical aspects—focusing on the quality of the referring source, the keywords in the link, and the page(s) to which they point.

People will not link to low-quality content, or sites that offer a poor user experience (unless they are compensated for the link). And unless you are fortunate enough to possess a ...

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