Link Building – problogger philippines

SEO Myths

Everyone praises search engine optimization (SEO) like it’s the holy grail to a successful website — it isn’t. First of all, always remember that content is king. If you do not have good original content and just link to other sites without even providing valuable insights, your sites have less chances at good traffic growth. Even having good content can be less effective if not published at the appropriate time.

A recently popular article over at digg entitled “5 Myths in SEO” lists the following pitfalls: “Overnight Results,” “Placement Can Be Guaranteed,” “Meta Tags,” “Submitting to Search Engines,” and “More Links > Good Links.” Any SEO company or practitioner who promises you these things is most likely lying, or too confident with his illegal methods.

My personal SEO recommendation: Write to your heart’s desire. Write with passion, and always try to provide something unique.

Buying & Selling Links

Should you really buy links? This is a raging debate among professional bloggers and SEO practitioners since the act of “giving a link” used to simply be a passge of information. However, Google’s Pagerank and system itself is highly dependent on links to and from several sites across the web. The way their system works has led to the assumption that linking as a form of business is bad or at least unethical, something countered by other prominent people on the web.

Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed this issue last year on his weblog, suggesting that Google is not particularly happy with the practice of buying and selling links. Threadwatch’s Nick Wilson (now with Performancing) found it rather arrogant that google would tell publishers how to do business and operate their sites.

My take? Buying and selling text links works in a moderated situation. You should never sell links on your site to “bad neighborhoods,” or resources that are dubious or do not provide value to your reader base. Buying links on other sites is a personal call, but one I’d rather avoid if possible. In fact, I haven’t done this for my sites at all.