While the nature of link building continues to change with each passing year, the need for it as part of a broader SEO effort remains the same. You will undoubtedly run into difficulties with expanding your reach and traffic if you do not succeed in this very important area of SEO, so how exactly should you focus on the task? As it turns out, there are many different elements and potential strategies to consider when formulating your very own link building campaign. In order to guide you in the right direction, we’ll discuss today some of the main decisions you’ll need to consider when building your link building plans.

Choose Your Overall Path

There are two main ways to build links in today’s world of SEO: you can either use guest posting, or you can rely upon your content’s quality and visibility. While there is nothing preventing you from pinging links using both of these methods, most brands agree that it helps maintain overall sanity to focus more broadly on one or the other. With guest posting, you’ll be building links by including them in excellent, high-quality pieces of content that you publish for other sites. With the other method, you’ll be focusing on creating the best content possible in the hopes that other blogs, websites and social media users pick up on it and share those links with their audiences.

Which Pages to Target

The act of link building is two-fold in terms of concerns. You want to consider which pages and websites you’ll be targeting for links, but you also want to consider which pages of yours should earn the links. In the case of earning links organically through exposure, you can’t necessarily pick and choose. In the case of guest blogging, however, you can decide which specific posts and pages of yours should be the target. If you are guest blogging, then be sure to focus only on earning links from websites that have some element in common with your own website. You do not want these links to look unnatural, or else they could actually do damage to your brand.

How Fast to Build

Link building is usually a slow and arduous process. In some cases, however, your link building efforts can take off rapidly. Whether this is through organic exposure or through guest blogging opportunities, you need to be careful about how rapidly your link building efforts expand. The biggest reason for this is that pinging links to and from a bunch of pages in a small amount of time can give the impression that your links are being earned unnaturally (i.e. being bought). Because of this, consider how best to scale up your link building efforts whenever possible. Additionally, you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew, especially if you are selling products or services: expanding your reach at a rate where you can control the growth and handle the demand is vital.

By focusing on how rapidly to build your link building efforts, which pages to target with guest posts and which pages to promote for optimal exposure, and which path to pursue in terms of your link building strategy, you can succeed in meaningful ways. What are some other concerns you have about link building? Tell us below what’s on your mind.