Manual Link Building is Tedious But Gets Quality Results

Link building is a great way to build search engine rankings for a website because search engines look on backlinks as a sign of quality. But link building also takes a great deal of time and often leads to discouraging rejections.

Higher rankings of a quality site will attract customers who are more likely to make a purchase, consume multiple pages and return again.

Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to ask for a link and get one anymore. Smart website publishers understand that their links are valuable and that they can actually weaken a page’s search ranking if done the wrong way.

For these reasons, requests for links have declined substantially in recent years, at least according to the experience of this company. But manual link building isn’t a lost art. It just requires an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Let Them Build Naturally

Good websites acquire links without even trying. Build a high-quality product, and people will link to it without being asked.

This approach is slow  and takes patience. But the number of backlinks to a growing, high-quality website does build over time.

Some links vanish because a site closes, gets redesigned, the linking article is deleted, etc. Even so, quality sites will likely see new backlinks climb faster than the ones that disappear. Continuous site growth is necessary to get there.

One simple way to track them is by using Google’s Search Console or a similar product from Bing’s Webmaster Tools. They show a list of sites that link to your site. They also show the pages getting the links.

Ask for Links

This website gets many requests for backlinks, and we almost never accept any of them for good reasons. They aren’t relevant links to high-quality pages or sites.

Anyone who requests a backlink from another site should make sure that the linking page is relevant to the landing page. The linking page and website should have high-quality content.

This approach is low labor because it usually requires just an email. It also usually gets poor results because more site managers these days understand that linking leaks SEO value for the page with the link.

It helps to keep in mind that link building is similar to any sales and marketing tactics. The rejections usually far exceed the acceptances. Anyone who can get a yes 10 to 20 percent of the time is doing well.

Create and Distribute Links

This is the hard part because it takes a lot of work. It also requires tracking the results and seeing which ones work and which don’t.

There are ways of building links manually without having to ask anyone for them. They include:

1. Social media
2. Standalone blogging
3. Article marketing
4. Guest blogging
5. Blog commenting
6. Forum postings

Nearly all of these sources have “no follow” links, which means they pass no SEO value from the link to the landing page. If they have any value, it’s usually in the form of visitors who click on the link.

Manual link building takes time. But getting good results is not just following the above methods. It requires figuring out how to get links prominently placed on high-value pages.