Is Link Building the Most Important SEO Factor?
Jun 30, 2010

The field of search engine optimization is always changing. What works one year for SEO may not work the next year at all, and if it does it may be substantially less effective. That's why it is so crucial to continually evaluate your current SEO tactics to see what remains valid, effective and efficient. Considering this, the question is if link building has officially emerged as the most important factor in ranking highly within the search engines.

Link Building for Page Rank

Page Rank is the official term for the reputation and credibility that your website receives from the Google algorithms. The other major search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! have similar ranking methods, although neither is as prominent or ubiquitous as Page Rank is from Google.
Your website's Page Rank is entirely derived from the quantity and quality of incoming links that lead to your web pages. The higher your site's Page Rank, the higher you will generally appear in the displayed results. Therefore, link building has become one of the hottest topics in the field of search engine optimization over the last several years.

All Link Building is not equal

While link building is a great strategy to boost your site's reputation and therefore your standing in the search engines, it must be noted that not all links are equal. The black hat techniques of link farms no longer hold any weight, and even the tried and true link exchanges that so many websites participate in have been devalued.
Additionally, techniques such as blog commenting and forum posting no longer play a large role in your website's Page Rank. The best links that you can receive for your website are unsolicited one-way links from highly reputable sites within your industry or niche.

Multiple Strategies are still essential

Although link building has emerged as one of the most essential factors for SEO, it is not the only factor that holds any weight. Effective keyword inclusion, the age and makeup of your domain, your website's internal linking structure and more are all still important in terms of how highly you rank in the results of search engines.
Therefore it's crucial that you continue to combine many different strategies to produce the best results. Additionally, never forget that all links are not created equally, and that high quality inbound links will be infinitely more effective than low grade, or black hat links.

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