& so are directory submissions & of course buying links.

Hi mate, i love your site (the fact it has page rank, that its relative to my site, it’s nice and aged oh and did i say the fact it has page rank!), fancy swapping links with my site?

Its called reciprocal linking and it’s DEAD!

Google states…

Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time

So WTF do you do?

It’s easy to say, Go and write good quality content and people will link to you, but what if you have an ecommerce store selling bin bags or operate in a competitive market where the authority sites are your competitors and they just wont link to your content. WTF do you do?

Ah, i know, what about directory submissions, there’s millions of them and i can autosubmit to thousands of them in an instant and all for $49 bucks!

Well unfortunately Google also states..

Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes

mmm Ok so WTF do i do?

You need to be socially active online!

Thats blog & forum commenting (i dont mean spamming!!!) There are many high quality blogs that carry good page rank and offer do follow links. Give some positive feedback to well written posts (you can make a start by commenting on this blog post, its do follow links!)

You need to write good quality, unique guest posts for blogs in your industry / niche

You need to be active in social media, thats you tweeting about others sites, digging other peoples articles, commenting on others YouTube videos etc

You need to get on authority sites radar? What? What i mean is that if you are linking to good quality articles and people are clicking through to them, then you’ll start to appear in there Google Analytics data as a referral source and they’ll notice you!

You need to make it easy for people to link to you!
here’s an example… If you like this article why not link to it!
here’s the code to copy and paste to your website / blog

<a href=”http://www.chriseo.co.uk/link-building/reciprocal-linking-is-dead/”>Reciprocal Linking is Dead</a>

You need to make it easy for people to Tweet and Digg your articles
(see buttons below)

& of course you do need to give people quality stuff to link to! (like this article so link to it )

So forget directories and link exchanges, and get SOCIAL!