With SEO (search engine optimisation), link building is still one of the most important parts in obtaining good quality rankings on the search engines. Link building has changed over the last couple of years with all the algorithm updates and it’s not about the number of links you acquire to your website, but about the quality of those links. 1 Quality backlink is worth so much more than 10000 irrelevant spammy ones. How fast you acquire new links is also a very important factor to Google.

The time you acquire new backlinks is called the link acquisition rate and this takes into account the time new links are discovered by Google. Building links over time tells Google and the other search engines that you are actively attracting links and is a very good sign of SEO.

To explain this in plain English: if you decide to start with a link building campaign and you acquire 1000 backlinks in a short period of time by submitting your website to web directories and then stop, it will show that you had very few links and all of a sudden had a massive spike in acquiring links. Google will notice this very quickly and if you don’t acquire any new links after this, it will show that it was a once of process. It’s important to build links gradually over a period of time.

How can you check your website’s link acquiring rate? It’s easy and there are many tools available to check this, but the one I’m using the most is called Majestic SEO. The free version will give you a visualisation summary report of the amount of links you acquired over a period of time and will showcase any spikes in links that you received.

Link building is worth gold for SEO and to generated targeted organic traffic to your website. Do it correctly so that your website can benefit from SEO and not work against you.