Whenever, we are speaking with a client one of the most difficult things we have to explain to them is the necessity and the importance of building links for ranking. Matt McGee over at Small Business SEM has written a great article explaining the importance of link building, and the difficulties that are inherent to the link building process. I think it is a great read for anyone who is in the process of hiring an SEO firm and I am sure anyone who has been in the process of hiring an SEO firm has had the following converstation:

Business Owner: “How come my site doesn’t show up in Google for ___________ (keyword)?”
Me: “You need more links to your web site.”
BO: “Links?”
Me: “Yep. Links are like votes. The more links you get, the more likely your site will show up in Google.”
BO: “I can ask my brother to link to me from his web site. You mean like that?”
Me: “Well, not really. You need more than one link, and it would be better to get links that are from sites related to your industry. And they need to be from other quality sites.”
BO: (gets frustrated and changes the subject)

This is by far the most important thing to take away from the article:

Sites that rank highly are sites that earn the majority of their inbound links, not sites that negotiate for them.

So what does an SEO mean when he says that your inbound links need to be earned?

1. People that naturally link to your site because they love your content
• While these links are great– and important to your overall rankings– you have no control over the anchor text. (Anchor text being the text that is used to link to your page– have strong anchor text can help your overall rankings)
2. Links from PR efforts
• These links tend to be great because hopefully a successful PR push will result in articles being written (and hopefully linking!) to your website. These links are fantastic because they appear within the body of content (which is the perferred way to garner a link) Now-a-day’s these links come from bloggers or other web journalists (primarily– and in greater bulk)
3. Links you have actively perused.
• It is very difficult to get quality incoming links to your website from other webmasters by asking anymore. Nearly all webmasters know that a good link is currency, and most don’t want to simply give it away for nothing. They may ask for a reciprocal link or offer to place your link on their “links” page. Neither of these are ideal, but *if* the site is within the same industry as you and that these reciprocal links don’t make up all the links to your site– we don’t see anything wrong with it.
4. Paid Links
• While they may not fall under the category of earning a link on your merit. Purchasing paid links from sites such as TextLinkBrokers.com or from the site directly isn’t a bad thing on its own. (Remember before– I said that links are currency. This is hard proof)

So what other categories of links would you consider worth mentioning?