Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

71. Does Link Building Help My Website?

An ideal situation for a website is to have many links leading back to it. Like word-of-mouth referrals to a company, the theory is that a large number of links back to a website indicates a high level of quality and relevance to a specific topic.

The key to good link building is to do the exchange with similar niche sites. Having a link from a Smoothie King site if your site is about insurance won't be a good fit. People who are at a Smoothie King site are more than likely not looking to learn about insurance.

By building links back to a website, you're essentially building a foundation of referrals that search engines can find and view as reputation boosters. Similarly, if those backlinks are on what the search engines view as high-quality sites, they will be more valuable than links placed on low-quality sites.

One of the biggest complaints about the web in general, particularly in the social web, is that there appears to be a lot of spam. Facebook requests or tweets often have links associated with these generally unwanted blog comments. Often, these spam issues are meant to just annoy but can lead to viruses or questionable content on the Web. Other times, spam is a link-building campaign for a different brand when it hopes for growing ...