Manual Link Building is an important part of making any website successful. It has a lot to do with search engine optimization (SEO) in the sense that the major search engines such as Google will categorize a website as a low quality website if the wrong types of links are found on the site.

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Relevant Links

The links that appear on your website must be relevant to the content of your site and they must be links that Google trusts if you hope to be ranked highly in their database of websites. This is why manual link building is so important. In the past, people thought that the more links they had on their website the higher their ranking with the various search engines would be. Once Google caught onto the fact that people felt this way, they started to change their standards that determine a website’s ranking. Google now considers a website spam if it contains several low quality links and gives more weight to links that add something to the individual website, rather than detracting from it. This means that if your website has a few quality links it will be more valuable to Google than a website that has many links that are not of high quality.

Manual Link Building

To participate in manual link building you can choose to either do it on your own or hire a company to do it for you. In the past, companies would engage in automated link creation. While they still do, smart website owners are learning that this method of acquiring links is actually hurting them when it comes to Google and other search engines.

Getting started in SEO

Manual link building can be a time consuming process but it is one that is necessary if you want to have an SEO friendly website. This is why many people choose to hire a company to do it for them rather than doing it themselves. The process of finding relevant websites to link to from your website can take hours or even days of searching.

To engage in successful manual link building, only choose links to include on your web page that already rank high with Google. Social media can be a huge help when it comes to manual link building because sharing those links on sites such as Twitter and Facebook can get more traffic to the websites you link to as well as more traffic to your own website.

Manual link building can be seen as a partnership between website owners within the same industry or at least industries that complement each other. For example, a website that represents a vet’s office could link to a website that represents a pet supply store and both websites will greatly benefit from this partnership as long as they are high quality sites. The website of a general practitioner that contains links to the websites of chiropractors or cardiologists can also help each other out. The key to success with manual link building is to make smart choices about what sites you link to. If both website owners advertise their individual website, both will benefit from the extra Internet traffic they will drum up for each other.

White and Black Hat

Another aspect of manual link building is finding white hat websites to link to. White hat websites are ones that don’t use deceptive tactics to drive traffic their way. They are the opposite of black hat websites that use deceptive tactics to drive traffic to the site. Linking to black hat websites can lower the quality of your website.

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Image Credits: Brian M. Anderson and FindYourSearch