by Kevin Bradley

Created on: April 13, 2011   Last Updated: April 14, 2011

A successful online marketing campaign has many different aspects other than just link building. Each aspect has its own role to play and all of them working together the right way leads to a successful campaign. However, in terms of an online marketing campaign it is the link building strategy which can make or break it.

All link building strategies aim to improve the visibility of a website in search engine results pages. A successful link building strategy will result in a site ranking better. The higher rank position means more visibility and this leads to more people visiting the site. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to implement the strategy. The right way achieves good results while the wrong way is expensive.

It is important to realize search engines play a huge role with the success ratio of any link building strategy. Building links the wrong way often results in poor visibility for common search phrases within an industry. This can cause the overall marketing campaign to fail due to not getting the marketing message in front of potential customers. It is therefore important to pay attention to how each type of link affects the ranking ability for a site.

1. Paid links. The obvious downside of paid links is the cost involved. It is an ongoing expense and only provides a benefit while covering the cost. As soon as the payment ends, the traffic stops. However, paid links play an important role in online marketing campaigns as they expose a site or brand to its key target demographic.

Paid links will not usually directly affect the search engine ranking of a site, but will provide direct access to targeted visitors. As long as the cost of a link acquisition produces a positive return on investment it is a viable strategy to pursue. However, when the return on investment turns negative it may be viable only to continue for branding purposes. Even then, costs need addressing.

2. Natural links. These types of links provide enormous benefit for a site. It helps to establish authority within an industry and gain trust from search engines. However, many people try to game the system through creating link farms and artificially inflating the importance of a specific site. This can work in the short term, but in the long term can lead to ranking penalties and fading into obscurity.

Instead of creating a link farm it is better to concentrate on creating high quality content. If the content is worth linking to other people will link to it naturally.

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