William Foote’s Internet Insider Blog

Incoming Links: The Missing Ingredient

April 29, 2008 on 11:16 am | In Search Engine Optimization |

I receive at least 2-3 emails per week from potential clients asking me why their search engine rankings are not within the first or second page of Google and/or Yahoo. They will say, we have done A, B, and C by the book for our site, but are still seeing meager results.

The reason in almost every instance is that they have failed to generate any meaningful incoming links to their website. Generating relevant incoming links is by far the single most important aspect of Google’s algorithm.

If you don’t believe me … then perhaps you will believe one of the internet’s premier internet marketing superstars.

“The most critically important aspect of search engine marketing is building quality incoming links to your website. And anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about…” - Brad Fallon (Accredited SEO Expert)

Before I go any further, let me quickly reiterate why high search engine rankings are imperative to business survival in today’s e-marketplace.

Simply put, organic search engine traffic is Free Traffic. A high search engine ranking virtually guarantees that floods of visitors will arrive at your website looking for exactly what it is you have to offer.

This will happen because the visitor typed in a keyword or a phrase that is relevant to your website, and because your site had proper optimization, your site shows up in the first few positions of the search results and gets the click-thru from the searcher.

So with this in mind, does it not make sense to focus in on “incoming link building” … the single most important aspect of obtaining a high search engine ranking? Of course it does.

I do not care if you find incoming links for yourself, have someone in your office find incoming links or you outsource to a company that specializes in it. The point is to simply not overlook this golden key of SEO success.

William Foote is co-founder and a managing partner of http://www.VMG-interactive.com.