Posted on February 10, 2012 by CJ Article Team

SEO Link Building – Link Building Techniques

The shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing is happening as we speak. People are not as ready to be sold to as they were a few years ago. If we want something, we go out and find it.

One of the major inbound marketing techniques is SEO (search engine optimisation). This consists, in its crudest form, of relevant on-page content and meta-data coupled with high quality backlinks which act as a vote of recommendation.

But as time goes on, and more and more people are building backlinks for the single purpose of SEO, will Google still consider this as a vote of excellence or as a self-serving activity? How will Google differentiate between those backlinks that are created only to build up a website’s page rank and those that are actual recommendations?

A few years back, Google introduced the ‘nofollow’ tag. Its intention was to stop spammers commenting on blogs just to get a backlink rather than social participation. A ‘nofollow’ can be attributed to any hyperlink and means that the Google Bots are unlikely to crawl it to find your website. They appear now on most blogs and forums meaning that most backlinks that are created in this way are for the purpose of user traffic rather than an actual backlink.

Even reciprocal links do not have as much weight as a one-way link so asking for a link exchange has lost its appeal as Google gets smarter.

So how do we build backlinks ourselves, showing Google that our websites are important without being considered spam?

One answer is article marketing. Article marketing is more than just getting a backlink to your website. It is an opportunity for other people to see it, like it and republish it – building you more backlinks and spreading your company name further.

If someone comes across your well written, attention grabbing article that stands out from the crowd and tells their friend or colleague about it – that’s better than adding another backlink to your collection.

You still get the opportunity to self-promote in the author box or resource box so you do get a backlink from most article submission websites. By convincing other people to republish your article on social bookmarking sites or through social media, the page rank of your page will go up as well, meaning your backlink has even more weight.

Anyone and everyone can build a backlink by commenting on a blog, so if you’re doing it, you should assume that your competition is doing the same. Because anyone can do it, the importance of a self-created backlink diminishes.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be taking part in discussions on blogs and forums just because we don’t get a backlink immediately. They are a great way of getting your name out there to others in your industry and a great way to learn.

As more and more people are building backlinks for SEO, we need to find ways to make our backlinks stand out to Google. Obviously the best backlinks to have are genuine recommendations from clients or colleague but these can be hard to get, especially when you’re starting up.

Because an article provides information to the user as well as a backlink to your website, it is a better backlink to have and it gives you the chance to build up credibility for you and your company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4841855