Interactive Marketing Blog

Found some interesting slides from SEOmoz that detail the pitfalls of buying links to improve your search engine rankings. The slides below suggest that buying links is a “quick fix” or instant gratification that can come back to haunt your site in time. It also recommends other tactics that will help you build your brand and gain natural links through SEO best practices.



One of the most interesting charts is on slide #34, the cost of paid links over time. The graphic below suggests natural links offer the best ROI of any link building tactic. Paid links will continue to cost the site owner hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a fixed result. Natural links, over time, can grow exponentially to outweigh the benefits of paid links for much lower cost.



If you are a business owner or an SEO looking to get the most exposure for your money, look to natural link building tactics. Building a user friendly website with valuable content is the best way to attract links in a natural way. Search engines will love you and your site for it.

What natural link building tactics have you used to gain traction in search engines?

This week I stumbled upon an interesting forum thread on Google Webmaster Central. It appears that Google Webmaster Tools has removed the PageRank metric from their site reports. In the post, a Google employee provides details on why PageRank was removed from the tool:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here:

http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq–crawling–indexing—ranking#pagerank

Time for some sleuthing. It has been known for some time in the SEO world that PageRank is simply a helpful indication of a website’s authority, but not the entire picture. The point above reinforces the idea that you should not focus on metrics like PageRank when looking for linking opportunities or your website’s search engine rankings. It’s important to keep the “big picture” in mind when building your site. Creating good content that people would link to naturally is the ultimate goal.

Is your company consumed with the PageRank on it’s website? What metrics do you use to help measure success?