Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts released a new Webmaster video addressing some misconceptions about the SEO industry.
While he addressed a couple of topics, the one item from the video that jumped out concerned SEOs and link building. According to Matt, SEOs might be focusing too much on link building. SEOs should instead be focusing on site design, creating compelling/useful content, user experience and content marketing. Links to content should grow organically. Social networks are now an important part of marketing the content, while also a great way to try to earn organic links instead of building links.
It’s hard to believe that links will not play a huge part in ranking sites going forward, but will this affect your SEO processes and do you really think that it will change your link building strategies?
Let me know your thoughts on the future of link building.
So user experience, modern code utilization, great and compelling content – this has always been part of the SEO formula. The Google algorithm changes killed the more grey/black hat method of link buying to boost ranking, which is a good thing. However, inbound linking showing authority still has to be a huge factor in ranking. The bad news is that if marketing folks focus on the buzz of content marketing, the quality of the content will go down in attempts to just post content for content sake that won’t optimize anything. So the near term future of link building is quality content that people will share, engage with and link to.