When you look across the search engine optimization industry, you see a lot of focus on link building. Now don’t get me wrong, attracting quality relevant links to your web pages is critical to success in search engines. However, focusing too much on link building per se is really an upside down approach to SEO. Allow me to explain.
Historically, when people talked about “link building” often times they conjured up images of emailing people for links, calling people for links, and otherwise begging and buying links. This is how SEO is upside down.
Today, SEO is about content development and sharing. The idea is that good content gets searched for, consumed, linked to, and shared. SEO is about attracting positive search signals, not about building them. You could build links all day every day by begging for them, submitting to directories, and a variety of other link building tactics and never come close to competing with one well planned, developed, published, and shared piece of content.