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A WebmasterWorld goes on another rant about how hard it is to do link building these days. There is a lot of confusion in the SEO industry, which makes it harder and harder for link builders to do their jobs.
That being said, senior WebmasterWorld member, Wheel, said that in the past few months, his link building efforts - which was primarily done via email requests, has had a horrid return on investment. In the past, he said he would get a "reasonable response" from his link request emails, but now, he is getting practically zero response. To counteract this change, he decided to go about it in a different way.
He is now building relationships with people that can link to him. The best relationship, he said, is those that you pay money. He isn't necessarily paying them money for a link. Instead he is creating ad networks within his niches and paying them money for those banners. After he has paid them and earned a solid relationship with them, he then discusses ways for those webmasters to link to his site.
As wheel said: "to get those links, it's now all about relationship building."
I think most link builders would say relationship links are way more effective than others. But at the same time, relationship links take more time and effort to get.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
gabs
05/14/2010 12:44 pm
If you don't link to me I'll tell your wife about the other night ;) Something like that can work hehehehe
Patrick
05/14/2010 02:54 pm
Very true, it is so difficult to spend so much time to optimize your site, do backlinks, link exchange, submit to press releases, social bookmarks whew! and now we have to really build relationships and spend money.. Well written, this is the direction SEO is heading and we need to keep having new ideas like building relationships. I wish there was an easy way to all this.
Nick Stamoulis
05/17/2010 01:41 pm
This makes sense, but I personally think this is an older approach to link building. Link building is about building relationships, but should be blended and more of a marketing approach. The rule of thumb that I always use if a good quality relevant link should be any potential link that could generate a targeted visitor to a website.
SEOSmith
04/05/2011 08:53 am
True it's becoming harder and harder to get links as requests are now ignored by many. I don't agree with a paid approach either. Most industries/verticals are small and the number of people that influence that specific industry are even smaller. Identifying and building relationships with those people is the key to positioning a company successfully within it's niche.