Organic Natural Linking

Organic Linking - Slow And Steady Wins The Race

Building links to your online business site is absolutely critical if you want to enjoy high search engine visibility for relevant phrases that potential customers or clients type into search engines.

The reason for this is that links to your site are considered 'votes' for your site by search engines. It is certainly more complicated than that - for example, not all 'votes' are considered equal - nevertheless, it's a good analogy.

Links to your site tell the search engines that other websites think your site has value - otherwise these sites wouldn't be linking to you. All things being equal, the more 'votes' you have - and the more relevant and 'trustworthy' those votes are - the more likely it will be that you can achieve high search engine rankings.

Higher search engine visibility translates into more visitors (and presumably more sales) for you. Consequently, link building should be an integral part of any online business strategy.

There are many different ways of building links to your site - some direct and others indirect - far too many to go into in this article. You can build links yourself or 'outsource' it to an SEO (search engine optimization) firm.

In my opinion, a good strategy for most businesses is to incorporate both methods - outsource certain kinds of link building and do other kinds in house.

Outsourcing link building is where many business people coming from the brick and mortar world go wrong simply because they don't know better. They grasp the importance of building links to their site but don't understand the pitfalls of the various approaches because they are new to the world of online business - where things aren't always what they seem to be.

If you wish to enjoy high search engine visibility for your website, it is absolutely critical that search engines always view the links to your site as being 'natural'.

Search engines consider many different elements when evaluating how natural the linking to a particular site is. It is a complicated issue so I would like to focus on one particular concept - organic linking - the speed at which a website acquires links.

The reason that organic linking is so important is because of the incredible amount of software-created search engine spam (junk web pages that are of no value to anyone) that the search engines have to deal with.

Because of this, search engines are hyper-sensitive about any aspect of a website that comes across as being 'unnatural'.

Please read the above sentence again because it is incredibly important.

Anything that seems unnatural to a search engine automatically creates a red flag for them - and that can not be good news for you.

Organic linking (sometime referred to as natural linking) is the best way to build your search engine visibility. If you are trying to build a solid business for the long run, it is the only approach that makes sense.

Suppose we have two new websites that are of equal quality and compete with each other in a particular niche.

The first website hires an SEO (search engine optimization) firm that creates 1,000 links to the site in two weeks. However, no additional links are created over the rest of the year.

The second site takes a different approach and hires an SEO firm that builds links slowly and consistently. At the end of the year, this site also has 1,000 links pointing to it.

At this point, both sites have exactly the same number of links pointing to them.

Here are two questions for you to consider.

1) Do you think search engines would consider one site's links to be more 'natural' or 'organic' than the other's?

2) Keeping in mind that search engines are constantly being bombarded with junk pages and grossly unnatural linking schemes by a wide variety of websites, do you think search engines would be more likely to give higher search engine rankings to the site whose link building is perceived by them as being more natural than the other site?

You don't need to be an SEO expert to answer the above two questions. The answers should be intuitively obvious to anyone.

At the end of the year, both sites in this theoretical example have exactly the same number of links pointing to them. However, the site that built links slowly and consistently will almost always enjoy significantly higher search engine visibility than its competitor.

As stupid as the 'instant gratification' approach is, it is nevertheless, the exact strategy that many stupid or unethical SEO firms sell. The reason for this is that "instant gratification" is always easier to market - even if it is exponentially less effective - than an approach that requires some patience and a longer term outlook.

The bottom line is that there are many different aspects to natural linking. Organic linking - the speed at which a website acquires links is just one part - but an incredibly important part - of the natural linking puzzle.

When it comes to building links, consistency is the key. Just remember: slow and steady wins the search engine race.

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