I was looking at my Google Analytics today and one of the many pie charts caught my attention.  The Traffic Sources Overview showed me that 92% of my traffic came from search engines (of course mostly the big G). Roughly 6% from direct traffic, so some readers were nice enough to add me to their favourites or even remember my URL! A measly 1.6% came from referring sites. That made me wonder, what is the point of link building?

I know what you’re thinking…link building is good for SEO. But is it? Obviously in the early days of SEO link building and keyword stuffing were the order of the day, but Google (and Bing, Yahoo etc.) are much wiser and they know a fairly won link when they see one.

At the beginning of a project, it might well  be worth adding links to directories just to get yourself on Google’s radar, but ultimately those links count for next to nothing in terms of SERPs position and traffic flow.

Of course links from relevant sites still count, and are very important. But the best kind are one way links and those are hard to get. Google knows all about webrings and pingbacks and doesn’t give artificial one-way links much credit. It especially hates anchor text that looks like it has been provided by the benefiting site.

One of the worst things you can do is send mountains of spam to webmasters. The kind of email that says

“Dear…, I am so excited about the content of your site that I wanted to share a link. Please link to my site about Dog Shampoo…”

That kind of thing gets you know where, most webmasters, like me, delete them in bulk from our inboxes and more than likely mark them as spam.

So all you can really do is use the safe, honest methods which are pretty boring with no pyrotechnics.

• Create good content often
• Visit other people’s blogs and participate in debates
• Leave them relevant feedback
• Only link to one of your own pages if it’s genuinely relevant
• Use forums and post relevant links if allowed
• Write articles to syndicate
• Invite your readers to comment (interesting debates invite links)
• Be patient
• Use Twitter

In a nutshell, spend the time you would have spent creating spam emails for webmasters on producing content. If you are assiduous about your blogging and you have something to say that’s worth hearing, the reader’s will come!