The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

There are different ways to skin a cat, as they say. But when it comes to kicking off a brand new Internet marketing campaign, there are certain things that you definitely want to include in that effort. Leave them out at your own peril.

Here are the steps you need to take in your online marketing campaign. Some of the steps can be performed in any order while others should be performed in the proper order stated. I’ll let you know when it’s OK to veer into a different direction or rearrange the order.

• Competitive research – Start with understanding where your competition is and what they are up to. Someone was in your space before you. Find out who they are and what they’ve done and are doing.
• Keyword research – You should include keyword research along with competitive research, but it does extend beyond competitive intelligence. You want study the competition’s keywords, but you also want to do your own independent research.
• Pay Per Click – PPC advertising will be your first test of your keywords. It’s fast and gets you the information you need quickly, plus you can drive instant sales with PPC.
• Search engine optimization – Next, take what you’ve learned from your competitive research, keyword research, and PPC and build a solid SEO campaign. You can do SEO before PPC, but I recommend performing PPC first so you can us it to test your keywords.
• Social media marketing – You want to save your social media campaign for later in the game. It’s a lower threshold type of marketing. It’s good for branding and building relationships, but you want to get your SEO and PPC going first so that you can use them to test your keywords and strategies.
• Video marketing – With videos, you can market with them before social media or after. It makes little difference, but you don’t want to start your video marketing campaign before SEO or PPC.
• Link building – Other forms of marketing like articles, blogs, and link building efforts are ongoing. Start them as soon you get your SEO campaign going and don’t ever stop.

It’s hard to believe that many SEO companies, Internet marketers, and companies online are using blog comment tactics from 2005 – tactics that aren’t at all effective and could hurt your reputation. On a daily basis, Reciprocal Consulting deletes spam comments, and some of them are from other Internet marketing consults who should know better.

Here are 5 specific ways that your blog comment might be considered spam and sent to the spam folder or the trash bin:

1. Your comment is generic and adds no value to the blog. I see this all the time. Comments that are written and are so generic they could appear on anybody’s blog. If you aren’t commenting on something specific within the blog post you are commenting on, then your comment could be considered spam.
2. The name you add to the comment form name field is your company name or a keyword. People like reading comments from other people. Companies and keywords don’t interact well with people. You’ll get more respect for your comments if you add them under your own name.
3. Your e-mail address doesn’t match your domain name. This one is particularly puzzling when I see a comment from a Web marketing company representing a client and the e-mail address is from the Web marketing company’s domain rather than the client’s. I delete them.
4. Your comment is full of links. The reason we ask for your website address is so that you can get a link back for your comment. There’s no need to add multiple links to your comment. We consider that spam.
5. Your comment is in a foreign language. I see this often enough that it’s worth a mention. Why comment in Japanese or Spanish when the blog you are commenting on is English? I’m just saying.

With all the valid link building strategies available today, blog comment spam isn’t necessary. Why waste your time?

One of the most confusing aspects of link building for a lot of webmasters and search engine optimization professionals is how to build diversity into their link portfolio.

The reason this is confusing to so many people is because many webmasters trying to do their own SEO get stuck on a single keyword phrase for their anchor text. If you focus only on your primary keyword, then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Also, a huge mistake is to focus all of your link building efforts on your home page. More natural link building involves building deep links to your internal pages.

Here are six things to keep in mind when link building so that you build a more natural and diverse link portfolio:

1. Vary your anchor text. It is best to use between 5-20 different anchor text key phrases for each web page you build links to on your website.
2. Do not just link to the home page. Most of your links should point to internal web pages on your website.
3. Seek out links from a variety of types of websites (blogs, directories, forums, etc.).
4. Don’t just target high PageRank websites. You should have a good number of links from low and mid-range authority sites.
5. Build a few links from websites outside of your niche.
6. Use non-keyword types of links too. “Click here” and “go to” type links can be effective in driving traffic and are natural link building phrases. Just don’t do it too often.

A diverse link portfolio consists of high authority links, low authority links, links from a variety of different types of websites, and a diverse set of anchor text phrases.

Debra Mastaler lists several “new” linkbuilding methods, but it seems that these methods aren’t so new after all. In fact, if we run through the list, we’ll see some pretty common strains:

1. Document sharing (used to be directory submissions)
2. Retweet buttons
3. FutureTweets (or scheduled tweets)
4. Use tools to determine when your Twitter audience is most active and schedule your tweets and retweets for that time.
5. Use Twitter Search to find hot topics (or Google Trends) and write about those topics on your blog, then retweet them during peak Twitter times for your audience.
6. Grow your Twitter base.
7. Use linkbait.
8. Run your pages through Copyscape and request content thieves to link to you (and I’d add, if they don’t do so, ask them to remove your content).

Essentially, what Debra is suggesting that link builders do today is the same as what they’ve always done except that the tactics are updated for a social media world – particularly Twitter (isn’t that the same as saying that social media IS SEO?).

Here’s the bottom line: Keep building links, but you don’t have to abandon the old ways of doing it. Just update your methods to take into consideration current popular and trending social patterns. Let the search algorithms take care of the rest.

When it comes to link building, measuring which links are taking hold and which ones are not is very important. Yahoo!s Site Explorer has been a tool that webmasters have used for many years and it has been considered the best free online link checker available. But it’s changing.

Exactly how Site Explorer is going to change is anybody’s guess, but Yahoo! has announced that its integration with Bing will lead to an inevitable change in Site Explorer some time in 2012. Here’s a snippet from the announcement:

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites.

The bold text is mine.

Just what are these new features? No one knows. But if they improve Site Explorer, then they are welcome. For now, however, webmasters can go on using Yahoo!s Site Explorer as they always have – analyzing their inbound links and looking for new link building opportunities. My hope is that these features will not go away.

Is it possible to improve search engine rankings overnight? Let’s say you have a few keywords that are attracting search engine traffic, but you know that you rank at the bottom of page one or on page two for those keywords. What should you do?

Consider that about 90% of searchers click on page one results. Also consider that more than 80% of searchers click on one of the top three listings on page one. It makes sense to try to increase your rankings for those keywords that are moderately successful.

What you want to do is identify those keywords that are sending you traffic but whose search engine rankings are below the top three positions on page one yet not further down than page three. Got that list? Now, start a link building campaign that focuses on building solid anchor text links for those specific keywords.

This process should take no more than a month or two. If you build good links – that is, focus on links from high authority web pages, use specific anchor text, stay away from spam in any form, and stay consistent and steady – then you can increase your search engine rankings in just a short time.

Link building is a time consuming process, but it is well worth the effort for the pay load on the back end. It won’t happen overnight, but it can happen.

Content and links go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or like a hot dog and mustard (or ketchup if you are under 10 years old).

Seriously, building content is one thing. You can write great content and even make it shine for the search engines as you sprinkle it with your favorite keywords, but you’ll find that your best content really takes on a life of its own when it starts to attract links.

Links serve some very important purposes:

• Inbound links are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page relative to other web pages on the same topic
• Links are a reflection of your brand
• Links can serve as a reputation management tool
• Links are a very important path for traffic to your website
• Links often serve as a clue to website content readers about the nature of the content on a web page being linked to
• Outbound links can be a way to attribute a source upon which your own ideas are based.

Links serve many purposes, but they are important because search engines use links to crawl the web. A web page cannot be crawled by search engine robots – hence, cannot be indexed – unless there are links pointing to it.

When it comes to building your content, don’t just think about the content itself. You should also consider how links – your own as well as any the content itself might attract from somewhere else – can be used to enhance the content and make it more valuable for your audience.

A lot has been said about article marketing. Good and bad. It used to be the preferred online marketing method for serious Internet marketers. For some people, it still is. But when I say “article marketing,” what do you think of? Yeah, that’s what most people think about – link building.

There’s nothing wrong with writing articles and submitting them to article directories in hopes that you’ll attract inbound links to your website. And there’s nothing wrong with writing guest articles for other blogs and websites for the same reason. But ask yourself this question: How much time do I spend seeking inbound links via article marketing and guest blogging versus writing content for my own website?

If you spend more time seeking inbound links through articles and guest blog posts than you spend writing quality articles for your own website, then I’d say you aren’t spending your time wisely.

The reason I say that is because there is no content more valuable than the content you write for your own website. Search engines can always change their algorithms to devalue links that you spent hundreds of hours chasing. We’ve seen that several times over the years. But if you write quality content for your own website, you will seldom see a change that devalues that content. The key word there is “quality.” In other words, not spam.

Never forget this: Content is king. It always has been and always will be. Links are good, but the best article marketing you can ever do is to write quality content for your own website.

If you are a real estate agent or broker, you might feel more comfortable getting your SEO advice from another real estate agent or broker, or from the National Association of Realtors. That might not be such a good idea, however.

Think about this: Would you caution your real estate clients against getting real estate advice from anyone other than a real estate agent? The reason is obvious, isn’t it?

The NAR recently posted SEO advice for real estate agents in an article on its website. The problem isn’t so much in the general advice NAR gives, but in the specific advice.

For example, its six recommended SEO practices include:

• Write better page titles
• Broadcast your links
• Use keywords generously
• Reword outgoing links
• Develop a site map
• Tweet about it

That’s a mediocre list, at best. What’s not on that list and should be are: 1) list your site on local directories; 2) claim it on Google Local, Bing Local, and Yahoo! Local; 3) and start a blog. But the nitty-gritty details of these bullet points isn’t much to be desired either.

For example, hear what NAR has to say about keywords:

Your main keywords should appear at least 10 to 13 times per 700 words on a page, says Mark Menzella, who runs RE/Advantage, a real estate Web design company in Fairfield, N.J.

In industry speak, this concept is called “keyword density.” The problem is, keyword density is a huge myth. It doesn’t work. There is no optimal number of times a keyword should appear on any web page. That’s because the search engines use almost 200 criteria for determining where pages rank for a specific keyword.

Let’s look at what NAR says about tweeting:

“Now that tweets are indexed in Google, Twitter has become an important part of SEO strategy,” says Misty Lackie of Go Smart Solutions, a technology consulting firm in Grover Beach, Calif. So get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and create useful tweets that happen to include your business keywords and links to your site.

Honestly, I’ve never seen much SEO benefit from tweeting. Keywords in your tweets don’t help you much in terms of your website’s SEO. Even anchor text in your links from Twitter are low grade since those links are no-follow links. That’s not to say that Twitter is a bad marketing tool. Rather, it’s a highly effective marketing tool for getting you some local exposure, but for SEO, it’s not a must-have tool.

Your best bet for good SEO advice is not to rely on industry professionals within real estate. You should get your real estate advice from real estate agents and brokers, but get your SEO advice from professional SEO consultants.

SEOmoz is a leading SEO blog and they recently posted a very thoughtful essay on Q&A sites and the value of SEO. I encourage you to read the entire blog post, but I’ll offer a few highlights here.

For starters, there is a general encouragement that, despite Google’s recent farmer update, Q&A sites still are a great opportunity to build your own reputation and to do some back linking. If you’re not familiar with the farmer update, let’s just say that Google introduced an algorithm that put a slap on some of those how-to sites, what are generally referred to as “content farms.”

Interestingly, many of the sites that were affected are sites that are written by average Joes. These sites are HubPages, Squidoo, and Associated Content. Even EzineArticles, the popular article directory (and a few other article directories), took a hit. But many of the Q&A sites did not. This forms the basis of Pavel Israelsky’s argument.

I’ll have to hand it to Pavel. He does a good job of outlining why Q&A sites represent a great opportunity right now. Here are his six reasons:

1. People Google more questions than generic keywords
2. Q&A sites have grown in popularity in the last year
3. Q&A pages rank high in the search results
4. They also offer great diversification opportunities for your link portfolio
5. People prefer to link to Q&A pages than to corporate-sponsored pages
6. Targeted traffic means better conversion

I can’t really argue with any of those points. Keep in mind, however, that if you use Q&A sites to target your important keywords, be sure that you find out which questions related to those keywords are being asked in the search engines. That will be key to optimizing your Q&A posts. If you answer questions that are asked, try to optimize your answers as well.

Q&A sites are a relatively recent phenomenon. If they start getting spammed with useless content, you can expect another Google slap down, so don’t go hog wild. Just see the opportunity for what it is and approach it intelligently.

Website owners have been trying various tactics to build inbound links ever since Google started ranking pages.  There have many different tactics used, some ‘white hat’ and others ‘black hat’.  The New York Times recently ran an article titled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,” which discussed the link building program of J C Penny.

According to the article, J C  Penny engaged in a wide campaign of securing links to specific internal pages. The problem was, these links fell under what is generally termed ‘paid links’, a link building method that Google has stated is against their terms of service. For J C Penny, the campaign worked well with their websites ranking number one in organic search for a wide range of keywords – and they did so throughout November and December, the peak online buying season.

In fact, they would probably still rank number one if it hadn’t been for the New York Times article.  The inherent danger in any paid link campaign is that detection is always around the corner – and once detected, your web pages could faced severe penalties (note – Google doesn’t use the word penalty, but there’s no other word for it really).  BMW suffered a Google ‘correction’ several years ago that resulted in their web pages being removed from Google’s search index completely.

J C Penny have got off lightly in comparison with their search ranking dropping from number one to number fifty – that’s a drop from page one to page five or six. That’s still enough of a drop to see their online traffic dry up. Link building using any black or gray hat activities is a risky approach. While white hat approaches will take time, once you do work your way to a reasonable search position, you know you’re there legitimately, and that you’re not going to be knocked down tomorrow. Sites that buy links could go from hero to zero overnight – how much are those links worth then?

Infographics can be helpful or just a sad attempt at link bait. But one thing is for sure, if they are helpful to others then they can helpful to you. This infographic by Vertical Measures illustrates that very well.

What makes this infographic so useful is it’s awesome simplicity. Right away you’ll notice that there are two categories of links based on this graphic. There are PR values and there are link types. The graphic breaks link types down into these categories:

• Content
• Blog/Forum comments
• Purchased
• Reciprocal
• Embedded
• Reclaimed
• Natural
• Requested

But which ones are the most important, or most valued?

This is really subjective, but Vertical Measures ranks them according to two metrics – difficulty and quality. In general, the more difficult it is to obtain a link of a particular type then the higher quality that link will be, which translates into more value for the link builder.

From easiest to most difficult, VM ranks them this way: Content Distribution, Blog and Forum Comments and Purchased Links are easiest to obtain. Next are reciprocal links. The third level of difficulty is populated by social media links, embedded content and reclaimed links. Natural links are the next most difficult to obtain and the most difficult links of all are link requests. This is almost a no-brainer.

From lowest to highest again, quality scores are broken down this way:

• Reciprocal links are in the lowest position (note that they are second level in order of most difficult or easiest to obtain)
• Purchased links and comments are slightly higher quality than reciprocal links
• Distributed content and social media links are next on the quality scale
• Embedded content is a bit higher quality than social media and content distribution links
• Finally, the highest quality links are reclaimed, natural and requested

Notice some slight jumbling in the order but generally following the same parallel between quality and ease of obtaining?

The most interesting part of the value score that I find, however, is the break down of PR values. A PR1 link, for instance, is the equivalent of 11 average links, according to the infographic. That begs the assumption that the PR1 link you get is above average. The question is, What’s average? Would that be a 3 on the quality scale? If so then that would include social media and distributed content links. But some of those types of links can themselves be extraordinary, can’t they?

Vertical Measures places a PR10 link to have the equivalent value of 28,080,881 average links. In other words, get one PR10 link and that could be enough to push you up to a respectable search engine ranking.

Getting the picture yet?

I think the point is to get you thinking about what types of links you should be going after. Personally, I think you should pursue any links you can get. Many Internet marketers in recent years have tried discouraging their clients from chasing reciprocal links because they aren’t valued as highly as one-way links. But the fact is they do carry value. Get a reciprocal link from a PR7 site when your site is a lowly PR4 then that will be a valuable link.

I think you can over think the question. To build a solid link portfolio you need to build diversity into it. That means not focusing on any one particular type of link or link from sites with a high PR. After all, PR1 links carry value too. And some day that PR1 site might become a PR8 site. Your link will still be there.

When it comes to link building, just do it. Do it smartly, but don’t over think it.

If you want to become an Internet marketer, whether your interest is in affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing or you intend to promote your small business through Internet marketing strategies, then you need to become familiar with Internet marketing terms. Here are 5 terms every Internet marketer should know before starting their IM career.

• Keyword – What’s a keyword? If you don’t know what that means then you’ll have a difficult time figuring out how to market yourself online. It’s a very basic concept and an important one. A keyword is any word that you would like your website to rank for in the search engines.
• Search Engine Optimization – Also called SEO, for short. Search engine optimization is the utilization of keywords and links to help your web pages rank better in the search engines.
• Social Media Optimization – You’ve no doubt heard of social media. Maybe you’ve heard of social media marketing. But have you heard of social media optimization? This is the practice of producing your content in such a way that it has an increased chance of spreading itself around in social media circles.
• Link Building – You cannot maximize your SEO efforts without inbound links. These are links that point to your website without a reciprocal link back to the linking site. Also called one-way links. Link building is the process webmasters utilize to build their one-way link portfolio.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online paid advertising where you bid on keywords and you pay for the advertising after your target audience clicks on the ad and visits your website. Other forms of PPC-like advertising include pay per action (PPA) and pay per view (PPV), or CPM (cost per thousand views).

These are not, by any means, the only terms you should be familiar with. There are others – viral marketing, video marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS (cascading style sheets), and many more – but these 5 Internet marketing terms are so basic that no one should start their Internet marketing plans without being familiar with them.

Take the time to learn if you want to earn.

One aspect of link building that rarely gets talked about is online reputation management. Of course, in many ways, the reputation management benefits of link building are ancillary – they aren’t the main goal. But if you are cognizant of the impact that links can have on your reputation then you can influence your reputation online just by adding a few inbound links to your important reputation enhancement web pages.

For instance, let’s take your About page. Your About page likely has information about your professional reputation that you want your site visitors to know. But do you promote it?

Many webmasters spend a lot of time building inbound links to their important landing pages, as they should, but neglect to build links to their Contact page and About page. Instead, they let their internal website links serve as the means of driving traffic to those pages. But you can actually build reputation enhancing links to those pages as well. How?

Here are a few ways you can build inbound links to your reputation enhancement pages and use link building as a reputation management tool:

• Press Releases - When you send out a press release to online press release distribution websites, make sure that you include a link to your About page with important anchor text regarding your name or reputation. You might include a sentence like this in your press release:  “(Your Name) is a recognized expert on guinea pigs.” Let “expert on guinea pigs” be your anchor text.
• Social Networking Profiles - When you link to your website from your social networking profiles, link to your About page. You might say something like, “For more information about raising guinea pigs see (Your Name)’s online bio.” Link “(Your Name)’s online bio” and let it serve as your anchor text.
• Social Bookmarking – Why not just social bookmark your About page at some of the popular social bookmarking sites? Ask your friends and most valued customers to do so as well.
• Like Button – Add a Facebook Like button to your About page.
• Request Links – Request links to your About page. You’d be surprised how many people actually will link to your About page if you ask them to. You might even provide them with some choices of anchor text for their links.
• Blog And Forum Signatures – When you comment on blogs and forums, occasionally link to your About page instead of your home page and other landing pages. You should vary your links anyway. Just be sure to throw your About page into the mix with appropriate reputation enhancing anchor text.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important online. Why not use the activities you are already engaged in to improve your reputation and the perception that others will have of you and your business?

Internet marketing has grown so much more competitive and sophisticated in recent years. Beyond your own website, there are several places online you can go to build more content related to your niche and even include inbound links to web properties you own. Here are 5 such websites where you can go to building related content.

1. Squidoo - Squidoo is more than a content tool. It’s an online marketing and money making tool to. You build “Lenses” around a particular topic and can include links to any online resources that you choose. It’s great to use as a link building tool because you can make your Lenses relevant to your niche topic and website AND it has a PR 8. In addition, you can add AdSense code and affiliate links so that your Squidoo Lenses make money.
2. HubPages – HubPages are almost like Squidoo Lenses. You can build them around a niche topic and earn money from them. However, they are most effective when you build shorter pages (Squidoo Lenses work better as longer articles) with several of them on the same topic linked together to form a hub.
3. Knol Pages – Knol Pages are not as monetizable as HubPages and Squidoo Lenses but they are good for building links. Write a high value article on a given topic and link to your own web properties. It’s a great link building tool.
4. Associated Content – Now owned by Yahoo!, Associated Content is a lot like HubPages. You create content around a specific topic and link out to your own web properties or other web properties. You can monetize your AC pages with AdSense ads and share the revenue with AC.
5. Examiner – Organized sort of like a newspaper (can you tell by the name?), Examiner is the local version of HubPages. You can create content on a single topic for a local audience and it’s a great tool to use for building a reputation within your niche, which is better than direct monetization.

With these 5 websites, you can become an expert in your niche above and beyond your own website and even use them to make money, build your reputation, drive traffic to your websites and increase your inbound link popularity.

Back in the old days of link building, two sites would get together and agree to link to each other using their most desirable anchor text and promising to link from the page with the highest PageRank. Often, those sites wouldn’t even be related in content. The practice worked – for awhile.

Today, that practice will get you penalized. As a result, there are thousands of SEOs running around telling people not to accept reciprocal links because they are “black hat”, “evil”, “not good”, “bad practice”, etc.
But, they’re not.

Reciprocal links are still valid if they are natural links. That means, if you would link to each other anyway because it’s good for your customers then it’s a good link, reciprocal or not.

Problems with reciprocal linking come in when site owners try to game the PageRank and search engine ranking system by trading non-relevant high-PR links. These links rarely do what they’re supposed to do if you approach the topic with some level of common sense and go about it naturally.

Ask yourself this question, “If I link to this website will it benefit my visitors?” If not then don’t do it, even if the other website owner promises you a high value link. If you can answer the question in the affirmative then go ahead; even a reciprocal link will be better than no link.

Search engine marketing is the practice of influencing a website’s rankings by increasing their visibility in the search engines. It is generally thought of as existing in two branches: Paid search and organic search.

Link building falls into the organic search model, which generally is defined as the process of building web pages with search engine optimization in mind and increasing a page’s chances of ranking higher in the search engine results. On-page factors alone generally are not enough to hold search engine rankings long term. Hence, the reason for link building.

Link building seldom does well by itself, however. A poorly defined website with poorly written content will not be made better with great link building. If your link building succeeds you will only be successful at driving traffic to poor websites.

But if your website is well written, has a great design, and your on-page SEO is excellent then great link building can give your site a real boost in the search engine rankings. And if you do any paid search marketing, your paid ads existing alongside your organic search listings will be much more effective. That’s when you know that your search engine marketing efforts are really paying off.

There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.

One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.

Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.

Search engine marketing is the process of using search engines to drive traffic to your web pages, primarily through search and paid search platforms. Crafty Internet marketers do this by focusing on niche-related keywords in their marketing efforts. How does that work exactly?

For starters, you’ve got to build value into your marketing campaign in your keyword research. This should be your first step in the process. Look for the best and most profitable keywords for your niche and focus your marketing efforts on those. After you’ve identified the best keywords, put them into a list and build your web pages to focus on those keywords with each page focused on a primary and a secondary keyword. Then build links using your keywords as anchor text.

Try a PPC campaign as a test campaign on one or two of your keywords and attempt to drive traffic to a keyword-based landing page. As you do this, note your CTR. If you are getting a high CTR on any keywords then focus on those keywords for building more web pages and for increasing the search engine presence of others you’ve already built.

Search engine marketing is not hard, but it is tedious. You can build value into any niche if you know the basics.

I was discussing link building today with a friend and we both agreed that link building is important. But neither one of us were willing to say it was the most important thing. You can build all the links you want to a poorly optimized website and you likely won’t get too far. But we’ve all seen the results of the Google Bomb, right? The problem is, one algorithm change and those bombs blow.

But on-page optimization is fairly constant. If you stick the basics – good content, clean code, fast load times, light on the images, proper keyword management, internal navigation – then your website should do well. Inbound links can never serve as a substitute for poor on-page optimization.

However, if you have a well optimized website with all the right design and content elements then a good link building campaign can enhance it tremendously. Link building should be seen as a supporting activity for good on-page SEO. It shouldn’t be a primary optimization tactic.