The Social and Monetary value of Back Links
One of the most important dimensions of successful SEO is the back link.  Back links (links inbound to your site) are important because in the battle for ranking, Google and the other search engines are going to give the victory to sites that appear to have the highest relevant content.  How do they determine this?  One way to accomplish this is to give weight to the number of web link which are pointing to YOUR site.  This makes intuitive sense.  What site do you think could potentially be more useful, the site that has 2 people pointing to it or 200?  These links could be on forums, blogs, social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others.  It doesn’t matter that much to Google.  Well, it does, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just assume we’re talking about legitimate links generated in legitimate ways.  More on that in a moment.

There are many strategies that one can employee to build back links.  You can hire somebody to generate back links for you.  You can use link exchange sites to swap and build links.  There are many approaches that you can use, most of these I would label as unscrupulous at best.  The “grey” and “black” SEO techniques will get you back links, but they will be of limited quality and of no real value add to the community.  Moreover, Google and the other search engines are getting wiser to what constitutes a low quality link verses a higher quality link.

I believe a good website, be it an online business, a company or personal blog or aggregate content site, should add value to the visitor, no matter what, no excuses!  I believe that if a back link is established for the shear sake of building a back link, you are doing your tribe, constituency, customer-base, whoever spends his or her limited time on YOUR site, a disservice.  Ask your self:

Is my SEO back link strategy adding any social value?

As far as monetary value of back links goes, I hope that is self-evident.  If it’s not, think of it in terms of search engine ranking.  If you can build your rankings enough to end up in Google’s Golden Triangle (Page One, Top three Listings) – you’re paid!  Until then, it’s slogging away at the optimization end until you get there.  Back links are a means to that triangle.

The Project
How then do we ethically and efficiently build meaningful links.  My suggestion, albeit the purpose of this post, is to suggest the 365 Day Back Link project.  Spend 15 minutes per day trolling around for a meaningful place to comment on a bog post, answer a question in a forum or write a meaningful blog entry and book mark it on relevant social book marking sites.  No matter what you do, try to do just one per day.  It’s that easy, it’s just a matter of making the commitment.

Some tips
One way that I’ve been finding great places to post is through Twitter and Tweedeck.  With Tweetdeck, I can set up a search that automatically scans the tweeterverse for posts relevant to my niche keywords.  If I happen to see a blog post come through, I can check it out and if applicable, leave a post on the site. Most blogs will allow you to enter a website address which is exactly what you want.  One back link down, 364 to go!  Remember to be ethical though.  Say something thoughtful and relevant and that ADDS to the conversation.  That is the key here – credibility and contributing to the community.  Getting a back link is SUBORDINATE to this!

I’m going to be doing a tweetdeck tutorial early next month.  If you’d like to be included in the newsletter, please go to our Contact Us Page and sign up for the mailing list!