Back in the day when you could get just about website to rank simply by pointing a ton of backlinks at it, outsourcing link building made sense. Pay your $20 and presto! – 24 hours later you have 10,000 inbound links and your rankings are headed for the stratosphere. Somebody else did the grunt work and you collected the money.

So what if 95 percent of the links were from third world-based blogs where English is a second language at best? Or if most of the links were from sites about underwater basket weaving and your company manufactured high-end garage doors? Back then a link was a link and that’s all it took to get you to the top of the Google food chain.

Poor quality links meant that websites with little to no useful content were being displayed at top of the results, and the search engine user was the worse for it. Complaints mounted and Google listened.

• In today’s SEO world, Google demands that links be relevant, freely given and editorially earned.
• This means that your inbound links need to be based on the nature of your relationship with the webmaster providing the link as well as on the quality of your content.

Link Building Today is Like Skating on Thin Ice
Link building can a perilous task if you don’t know or care about what you’re doing. One bad choice about accepting a link from a spammy site or optimizing your anchor text the wrong way, and Google could penalize your site, or in some cases remove it from the search index altogether.

Are you really comfortable putting the future of your company in the hands of an outsider, trusting them to take the extra time and effort to nurture quality links the way Google expects? Literally thousands of businesses have relied on an outsourcing solution to their link building chores only to discover that shortcuts were taken that destroyed their hard-earned search engine rankings.

Link Building is all About Relationships
Outsourcing your link building is more difficult today because links have to be earned, meaning that webmasters will have to be convinced of your ability to provide unique and informative content that won’t get their website into trouble with Google. They need to trust your motives and recognize your authority as a thought leader and source of reliable information about your industry or niche.

What you need is a spokesperson that can be trusted to take the time to cultivate the type of relationships that will provide the quality links that you need to rank in the search engines. More likely than not, your most effective advocate is going be found within the ranks of your business – someone who understands and can effectively communicate your company culture.

It’s the Quality, Not the Quantity of Your Links That Matters
Focus your efforts on acquiring quality links from the most relevant and authoritative sources you can find; sites with a minimum Domain Authority of 40 should provide plenty of quality link juice.

Once you have a manageable list of target sites, open up a dialogue with each of the webmasters or bloggers. Follow their blogs, ask insightful questions, and make useful and pertinent comments whenever possible. Above all, keep your name in front of them without being an obnoxious annoyance.