In life as in the process of link building, too much of something is usually not a good thing.

Let’s look at why this is the case.

When building links to your site, you’ll definitely want to exercise moderation. Building too many links into your site at a time will likely get your site “sandboxed” by Google. Your site will be put in this sandbox for three to six months (if you’re unlucky). At this time of writing, Yahoo and MSN still disregard a sudden and unnatural looking spike in inbound links. Thus, you could still get ranked on Yahoo and MSN by performing a super agressive reciprocal linking campaign or buying a large number of one-way permanent links. This may change but for now, this is still possible. Google tends to frown on unnatural looking links because it’s striving for quality, relevant information — not for ranking a site that suddenly has a larger number of links pointing to it. If you want to avoid the sandbox, definitely stay away from building links too quickly.

To rank well and for the long-term, you have to consider link building as a steady progression of increasing inbound-links. Rather than building your site like a rocket ship that shoots straight up in the sky, you’ll want to promote it using a stair-step approach. It should be gradual and consistent.

Achieving top search engine rankings is only the first step. You also need to maintain those rankings once you get them. Being in the top ten search engine results pages means you’ll be a target for someone who covets those positions. If you are in a competitive keyword arena, you’ll want to maintain a constant number of new links pointing to your site to maintain your rankings.

The other part to link building is the selection of keywords. Using the same exact keywords over and over again five hundred times would be a big red flag to Google. It’s effectively signalling to Google that you are spamming them with that keyword. Even if your site is relevant to that keyword, think natural linking.

Natural linking means that people link to you with their own choices of what they believe are a suitable title for your site. That means slightly different things to different people. People interpret your site differently and therefore this would result in different titles used for your site.

In “natural” link building, you could employ the same thinking. Let’s see how this works through an example. For instance, your site sells a variety of collectible clocks. You could select “collectable clocks” or “clocks” as your keywords to start. Now, expand upon those keywords and think of the kinds of clocks you sell. These could be “grandfather clocks”, “antique clocks”, “antique collectable clocks”, “19th century clocks”, “modern clocks”, etc. Vary your link text to make the inbound links to your site appear as natural as possible.

Now, combine the approach of using consistent inbound links and natural link text in all your linking campaigns. You’ll find that your site will achieve better rankings and have more sustainable growth over time.

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