When I started out, I thought that it was really cool when someone linked to my site. It was like an unexpected vote of confidence, and it made me feel all righteous for awhile. Little did I know that those inbound links were essential to my site building PageRank and traffic levels. Inbound links aren’t just pennies from heaven. They’re a big part of your site’s ranking in the search engines. And if they come from sites that themselves have a high PageRank or a high position in the SERPs, they’re worth even more.
Link building isn’t something you should just write at the bottom of your list to do later. It is something that you should work into your schedule preferably every day. There’s no substitute for great content, and for politely and genuinely asking good sites if they will link to your homepage or to some other page on your site. Devote half an hour to it every day and see what a huge difference it makes.
Some of the “Don’ts” for link building include the use of paid linking schemes. C’mon! Your site’s better than that. A thousand crappy links that you paid hard-earned money for aren’t worth anything and in fact could get you penalized or banned from search engines. But the main “Don’t” for link building is this: Don’t neglect it. Your site is too important to languish in the bottom of the search engine pile. Inbound links from quality sites are a testament to that.