There’s such a thing as “too much information”, especially for the companies

Getting your website the love and recognition it deserves is all about building as many links as you can.

Isn’t it?

One of the goals of effective SEO is to get your website to the top of the search engine’s results pages for a given keyword, and link building has long been at the heart of most online marketing strategies.

Links can drive traffic and they can contribute to the authority of your site.

And SEO was a lot easier when that was all there was to it.

There’s a lot more to SEO these days than just linking to your site using a couple relevant keywords. You might even be able to get some good attention without an actual link. It takes a little more work, but when you combine these tactics with traditional link building the results can be very effective.

The Evolution of Link Building

In the earliest days of SEO, a lot of online marketers took great liberty (and advantage) of link building, which often took the form of malicious, unethical link buying and link farming.

During these days, SEO professionals went link crazy, stuffing an over-abundance of links into their website content and going to less-than-honorable lengths to get a link from almost any or all external sites, regardless of the quality.

“Quantity” mattered far more than quality. It worked in the search engines and it was easier to show the higher-ups that work was happening because: “Hey, just look at all these links pointing at the website.”

Google quickly took notice of the unpleasant search experience this over-reliance on links produced and introduced some algorithm updates that specifically targeted pages with low-quality, spammy or excessive backlinks.

Sites that violated these new guidelines were heavily penalized. Some were dropped completely out of the search results until they fully cleaned up their backlink portfolio.

Despite this evolution, though, links are still a foundational part of an effective SEO strategy. But that doesn’t mean they should be the whole of your strategy.

If Not Links, Then What?

Links are a good start, but as the search engine algorithms continue to develop, your strategies also need to evolve.

This is most apparent when you look at some of the latest updates that put a much greater emphasis on high-quality content and improved user experience.

In other words, Google wants you to prioritize users over search engines.

While the first step in that process is to improve the quality and relevance of your content, there are also some “linkless” ways to bolster your website’s online credibility, trust and visibility.