The link building is an important part of SEO strategy for most of the popular search engines. Back when Yahoo Japan used its own search engine for the organic search results, the massive link building was perceived to be the key to the SEO success by many. It’s been 10 years since I originally wrote this article for ClickZ in 2011, sadly the huge dependency to the link building in the SEO practice is still around. I’m not a fan of link building practices just for the sake of SEO. But, I understand that many SEOs and the site owners are interested in this topic. In this article, I’ll provide 3 easy and effective link building strategy that don’t break your bank. I’m going to focus on the linking strategy that aims to gain the “quality links” which actually bring positive impact. Another good point about these 3 strategies is that you are in control.

1. Clean up on-site links and redirects

It’s not a good search user experience when a person is looking for a specific information, but lands on the home (top) page of the website. If your home page ranks well for all or most of your SEO keywords, it’s usually because the value of links pointing to the home page isn’t passed onto other important pages. You need to improve your on-site links.

If home page is linking to other pages, check if:

A) The links from home page to other pages are crawlable

B) Home page links to too many pages, and each link has little to no value

The home page should link to important pages such as category top pages and product pages with the way so that links are crawl-able by the engines. Home page is not a site map, and you don’t need to link to all pages on site from it.

If the site has gone through several re-designs and re-structures, you probably have some broken links and too many redirect chains on site. Use the link checker tools to find and update the broken links on site. Redirect old URLs to new URLs. If you know that you have been chain redirecting, clean them up and redirect from each old URL to the latest URL so that the search engines won’t stop crawling those links for “too many redirects” error.

2. Focus on the quality

Many SEOs and site owners like to compare the total number of links their site has with competing site does. This really doesn’t help. Having more links than your competing sites won’t help you rank higher automatically. What important is to understand which links competing sites have are helping their site, and especially the ranking page. That will give you an idea that what types of links you want to build from what types of websites.

For International SEO, knowing the locations of linking sites is also important. Analyze the link data, and focus on building quality links that will bring visible impact.

3. Use your own material

In addition to websites, many companies now have blogs/forums and social media pages as well as publish white papers & reports online, and distribute digital press releases. These provide the great opportunities to build quality links between relevant content and the specific related pages on site. Since you own these content, you have a complete control over how and where the links are made. However, many of them only link to the home page, or don’t link back to the website at all. It’s almost a crime that these content are not utilized well for the link building.

By linking from these content to related page on site, you can create quality links to the site and the pages and direct traffic to the site (first timers and repeaters).

Perhaps a better communication between the SEO team and the department in charge of these content is necessary. Providing a SEO overview explaining the benefit to them and the company can help getting their buy-in to the strategy.

Stop wasting your time and money to build thousands of links that won’t do much for you. You’d be amazed how much positive impact you see just by implementing above 3 strategies.