Building links for your website is the main way Google and the other search engines will rank your website. Creating backlinks means you add your keyword into another website as an anchor text which links to your website. This link can either be your homepage or a page within your site.

In this Blog we will talk about how many links you should create with a new website, where not to link, how creating links too quickly can damage your site and we will give you an example of poor link building techniques we have tried and tested as an experiment.

When running your Local SEO Link Building campaign you need to remember, this is a long process and it doesn’t happen overnight. Because your website is brand new, Google knows nothing about your website, what you do, who you are or what keywords are relevant to your website. Once you have built your website make sure you have high quality, relevant, unique content on your website, read our blog about SEO Content For Your Website – Part 1. This is highly important you get the content on your website right before you start your link building as your content will tell Google exactly what your site is about and what keywords you should be ranked for.

When you are ready to start creating links, remember, DO IT SLOWLY. Google will rank your site high through quality, relevant links meaning only create links that have the same theme as yours. For example, if you are an Accountant, only create links from other Accountants websites and financial related sites. As your website is brand new, you cannot go 100% on your SEO Link Building until your site is at least 6 months old, so build them slowly. I would suggest creating 3 high quality backlinks a day for the first month, then increase the links by one per day every month. So month 2 you will create 4 links per day, month 3: 5 links per day and so on.

Some people think you need to create tens of thousands of links to rank your website. Wrong! Your site will be ranked on quality links, not quantity. 50 high quality, relevant backlinks are far more powerful than 10,000 poor links. These poor links are classed as backlinks you receive from Link Directories, Article Directories and Blog Comments. Stay away from this type of link building.

The main point you need to keep in mind when you are creating links is that Google will always rank websites with quality, relevant, unique content. How many times have you searched Google for a service or product and a link directory was on the first page? none, exactly. This shows you that Google does not think these sites are important so they do not rank them and if your link is on these sites, Google will not think this link is important either.

The same applies to these article directories. People post articles to these directories and place to backlink within the article. Yes, this does sound right and ticks all the boxes for creating a quality backlink, for example a link surrounded by relevant text but this is still wrong. The link maybe surrounded and supported by relevant text but the article will not be unique. The same article will be published to hundreds of other directories, either a carbon copy or worse a spun article that makes no sense. Again we go back to Google and the other search engines that only looking for unique content, they will pay no attention to duplicates so your link is worthless as the page will not be indexed. Also these article directories have no theme, they cover every single subject and niche you can think of so the theme of the website is all over the place.

Unfortunately, there are thousands of Local SEO companies that still think this is the way to create backlinks and the chances are you have spent a lot of money using their ‘services’. The main companies that do this type of link building, are from India. You have probably received spam emails from them saying they will rank your site on the 1st page for $20! Remember these Local SEO companies in the UK also receive these spam emails, so they will probably outsource the work to them, they spam your site and then charge you 20 times as much!