Back links aren’t what they used to be. Back in the olden days (3-4 years ago that is) search engines cared more about the quantity of links rather than the quality. In today SE landscape though, all links are certainly not created equal. Below is a link types to avoid and the ones to go after.

Good Links, Spend Your Time Getting These:

Press releases: Google loves crawling PR sites, so getting your links on a well written press release can drive both search traffic and click-throughs.

Blogs: Again, SE’s love blogs because of their ever changing fresh content. A keyword rich link in a relevant blog post is a gold mine.

Articles: A well written article can be a great source of both traffic and natural search ranking. Because these links are within the context of an article, they are considered highly relevant.

Bad Links, Don’t Even Bother with These:

Reciprocal links: Reciprocal links are overused and look very spammy. Although it is possible to setup a mutually beneficial link exchange with a similar website, randomly link trading with unrelated sites is a really bad idea, and can tarnish the rep of your site.

Directory Links: Directories are a dime a dozen, and most of them completely useless. When was the last time you went to directory to look for something? The search engines feel the same way.

Site wide Links: Having a link in the navigation on the header or footer of every page in a site may generate a lot of traffic, but it won’t do much to help your organic rankings. When a link is everywhere, it is probably not as relevant as a text link within the body of a paragraph.

Spend Your SEO Time Wisely

With all the ways to acquire links, it pays to focus on only the strategies that produce results. The above tips should keep you heading in the right direction.