Everyone needs more links pointing at their webpages.  No matter what anyone else tells you, I am telling you that link building is still the trump card.  If content is king, then link building is god.

If you spend time doing one thing every single day, make it building more backlinks.

Why?

Google’s “natural” link building mantra is something that is becoming increasingly empty in the modern internet world. Where even two years ago good content might be rewarded with a blog post or link to tell others about it, nowadays that does not happen.  The people who used to give you a decent one way backlink and a recommendation are now tweeting and sharing using twitter, facebook, digg and stumbleupon. So your chances of getting a decent amount of quality one way backlinks is diminishing all the time.

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Nothing Beats A Good Old Fashioned Backlink.

Although Google does take increasing notice of the links and interest in a webpage through establishing a popularity concensus, nothing beats a followed backlink with exact anchor text.

I am sure if you have done competitor research for a keyterm you are considering trying to rank for you will have seen a site that demonstrates the power of a few deep links to a site.

Basically they always look the same.  They rank on page one somewhere. When you visit the site you always find the same thing, little relevant content and hardly any mentions of the key term or related search terms, yet there they are. So you take a peek at their backlinks in something like yahoo explorer and you see a few dozen links listed.

Okay so digging a little deeper you fire up http://www.opensiteexplorer.org and you see that most of the pages of their site have a few, maybe just one followed backlink pointing at each page, with the anchor text of that link as the exact search term.

Wow.  So that site is up there purely because of the topical relevance being passed from the anchor text in the links, just a few followed links.

That is why link building is important.

So yes you can submit to social bookmarking sites and listen to the people who tell you to build content and that manual link building will put you in hell, or you can rank well.

Keep building those bridges.

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Click here to buy the authority,  real-world link building guide, “The Linkbuilders Bible”, which has now sold over 2000 copies.

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Related posts:

1. HOW TO: Build Profile Links, A.K.A. “Angela’s Links”
2. How many links should I build per day?
3. Get Profile Link Power – The ultimate guide to building profile links.