In SEO terms, a big deal is made of the practice of building links. This is
because the major search engines view each link as being an indication of the
quality of your page. The more links a page has the more beneficial it is viewed
as being and the greater the perceived value of a link, the better your results
will prove to be. However search engines also attempt to ignore or devalue
those links that they believe have been gathered artificially, preferring to
see organically or naturally gifted links.

Organic SEO Links

Organic links for SEO are those that are offered freely by the webmaster of
another site and offered based only on the quality of your content. Google
and the other search engines believe that these links offer greater value because
they do not require any form of payment in return. In contrast, paid links
require financial remuneration and reciprocal links require a link back to
the linking page. The search engines believe that these offer less value as
an indication of quality because they are conditional on more than the quality
of a web page.

SEO Link Building

SEO link building can require the building of a large number of links to a
single page and while the search engines do prefer organic links this isn’t
always possible. Gaining links is the quickest way to improve rankings but
without a decent ranking other websites will struggle to find you in the first
place never mind value a page highly enough to link to it. Getting those early
links in place using preferred SEO methods can help to generate early search
engine traffic.

Viral Content And Linkbait

Viral marketing and viral SEO content are good for building links. Pages that
have a lot of link appeal are referred to as being linkbait. Video and multimedia
content offer popular content types and pages that include these will feature
highly in the rankings because of organic links. Lists, top tens, and guides
provide beneficial textual content and these again will often attract many
organic links for a single page.

Artificial Links

Artificial SEO linking techniques that most often face the wrath of the search
engines do include paid linking. Some link resellers or brokers try to stay
as far under Google’s radar as possible so that the links exchanged between
members and clients still receive the search engine benefit but if Google discovers
a link to be paid for then they will not include it when calculating the value
of your link profile.

Organic Vs Natural SEO Links

Links are often used as the currency of the Internet. SEO campaigns do require
the building of links but blindly buying and swapping links will not garner
the same benefits as strategically planning long term, semi automated link
building processes. Social Media Optimisation, article marketing, blogging,
and the provision of high quality content will inevitably lead to your pages
being awarded with natural links presuming that your site attracts the traffic
in the first place.

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