Do you  want to know how to find links to your website? You might have recently read about the problem with JCPenney and their SEO company. If you haven’t, here is a link to the New York Times article.

If you understand the basics of SEO, you grasp the significance of links to your website. Because of the importance of linking, people can go to great measures to get better results with more links! These mis-happenings occur every day with websites. JCPenney is a well known retail store so it hit the news quickly! So let’s examine link building a little closer.

There is much more of a fine line between good and bad SEO in reference to linking.  Google approves of SEO but is much more vague about the SEO rules then people understand. Let’s create two hypothetical scenarios:

Here are two examples:

1. You write and place a great article on a website and the following week 100K people link to your article.

2. JCPenney pays an SEO company to get links and in one week 100K links appear.

The power of linking is incredible! At one time if you searched for “failure” in Google you got Michael Moore’s site and George Bush’s bio. This happened only because people from each side linked to each of those sites with the word “failure” in the link. Google fixed this, but search for “failure” now and you will see references to it.

All good SEO companies encourage linking but the difference between good and bad (according to Google) is that it should be slow and natural (sincere) vs. instant, paid or unrelated links.  SEO Does Matter declines linking requests all the time because they are not relevant to what our clients’ content is about. JCPenney was being linked to, from any website possible.

So does pursuing links imply bad SEO strategies? No, it doesn’t. You should work hard to follow what Google wants and recommends. (When you have some time, read about it in Google Webmaster Guidelines.) Referring back to my second example, imagine you wrote that article and had a bunch of people linked to it and none of their sites were relevant to the website that you placed your article on. This lack of relevancy could cause this site to be penalized from this innocent action.

Here are 5 ways to find links to your website!

1. Use theme based relevant links
2. Manually add each link instead of paying for automated links
3. Find websites that have good page rank and appear in good standing
4. Use permanent links from websites that are relevant to your website
5. Use links that are search engine friendly (based off of Google Webmaster Guidelines)

Use quality link building techniques! Keep good standards with Google and all search engines. Then, continue to work hard and enjoy SEO benefits from your search engine results!