Link building in 2005 vs. 2010- A Look Back

Whenever someone point black asks me “What is the most powerful thing I can do for my website to get it noticed and get free visitors from Google and other search engines?” — here’s what I say.

Concentrate on distributing content all over the internet that you control and can also control the words that are used in the hyperlink pointing back to your site (known as “anchor text“).

I always like to use visuals for those who have a hard time seeing this.

Let’s say for instance, that a cumulus cloud out in the sky represents the entire body of World Wide Web content on the subject of golf below:

The dots in the cloud above represent hundreds of pieces and pockets of webpages, videos, audio, pdfs and other content.

So if you happened to concentrate on the golf clubs and strictly focused on drivers, your ultimate objective over time (a key component) is to slowly begin to occupy the space of content in that specific sector.

Most people end up dabbling around and create one or two pieces of content and never make it a routine to continually build a library of content that can be distributed  all over the net (most often for free).

It’s great having a website, but you really want folks bumping into your dispersed content throughout the internet that then leads them to ending up at your site.

In fact, the more motivated and space you occupy within the cloud territory of your niche market, the more traffic you will on pile toward your website.

Almost frighteningly scary, having a pre-eminence in a marketplace with a considerable amount of content, you begin to get recognized and looked as an authority.

And that’s the ultimate goal here, right?

More authority and command for attention, the more traffic and sales this equates to at your site… bottom line.

Fact is, most people like, sorry, love FREE traffic, and also realize that it is key to a long term strategy of building a brand and a presence.

But don’t be allured by the word FREE.

FREE has its cost in either manpower, your own time or the purchase of software to speed things up.

And it really comes down to whether the cost of how many invested hours, the trial and error vs the net returns are worth it for the total time invested.

That constantly remains a burning question in the back of probably 90 – 95% o online business owner’s minds (because you can’t see, touch or feel results when you haven’t tried it – and for the most part, humans tend to initial doubt what they’ve never tried or experienced).

Wow – what a different five years makes!

Five years online can equate to 125 light years here on earth.

But at the core, the process and basics of putting intentional effort to get other sites to publish your content and then link to your hasn’t changed much at all.

However, what has changed is the multitude of ways and sites and strategies have grown as the creative progress of humanity continues.

In case you are brand new and not sure of what it is I’m talking about and why on earth you would want other sites to link to you, I’ll start out with this.

It is without a doubt that if you build a website and leave it there without attempting to get attention outside the website itself, your chances of getting visitors is extremely thin.

Passive Promotion vs. Aggressive Promotion

Some well intentioned people imagined in the beginning that if you post incredibly valuable and thought-provoking content, other websites will discover or seek out that content, or eventually bump into it somehow and naturally link to it.

Certainly, if you never get out and mingle amongst your audience on forums, blogs, and amongst your peers, getting noticed is even less likely that folks would link to you, let alone know of you.

It was all a great theory…

Creating value is a good model to attract visitors, but the fact is everyone is busy and there are way too many billions of pages in 2010 for people to just happen to bump into yours and then go take time to alter their web page and give you a link.

Passive promotion may please the pussy cat in you, but it does does not get anyone’s attention, especially if there’s not one iota of engagement with the visitor.

So back in 2004 and 2005, I began employing a system of building inbound reciprocal links to my site.

If you’ve had a business for any time, you’ve received a reciprocal link request from other webmasters wanting to trade links with you.  (And this STILL works, but most are trading links the wrong way because their standards suck!)

So usually one webmaster initiates and asks another webmaster if they would like to exchange mutual links.

It is usually common practice to contact websites in the same or categorically related topic, but even a link from a non-relevant site is still worth it!

While some folks will tell you that exchanging links from irrelevant sites is bad and evil and you’ll get penalized, that’s not ture.

Why?

Because it’s the text falling 15 words to the left and 15 words to the right of the actual text in the hyperlink that is what makes a difference.

This was at the time in 2004 and 2005 (even 2006) very pooh-poohed and while others were avoiding it like the plague, I went straight into the fire.

The reason I believed that linking was a solid strategy was looking at it long term and not being desperate from the getgo.

Instead of making my own standards extremely low and being desperate by accepting links from sites that put our link among 75 – 150 others on the page.  Sorry buddy!

It’s a matter of being picky and selective with who you choose to share links between sites.

And while reciprocal linking is still pooh-poohed in 2010, I am a true believer in it though I may not practice it as actively as I once did.

You should discover a style of building inbound links that work for you, choose one to begin with and master that first.

Once you have refined and polished and completely mastered that first technique do you move onto the first.

It’s highly imperative to master the first technique because you are literally imprinting on your nervous system exactly what the art of mastering something is.

It may well take a month, two months, even 6 months depending on how often you practice.

Without constant exposure over and over to one thing until it becomes second nature — you have not mastered it and should not stack on any sort of additional link building tasks.

After mastering something once, I can tell you from experience that mastering the second and third and fourth technique thereafter is like a “piece of cake.”

This is how the Master of Search Engine Seduction started out in the infancy stage by laying a good foundation.

Desperation is not a good mindset to begin linking building because it requires discipline, determination and persistence to yield measurable results for the long term.

Remember, you want to slowly begin dispersing your content in various forms all over the internet so folks bump into you as they go searching around the internet, researching the topic you want to be found under.

Now it’s time to discover what link building is like in 2010 and what Google is looking for so you don’t have to sit around and guess.

You will then begin to see the stark differences in how link building has changed and what you must now do to make your website even more interactive.