Link building, tools and doing it the right way

[seopadawan]

I've been looking into and reading up on link building and I've come across a few tools (I'm on a Mac) which caught my eye. They both look interesting and I played around a bit with LinkAssistant. But after reading a bit on Aaron Wall's site and a few other places, it seems that these kinds of mass, reciprocal link campaigns are frowned upon and may in fact do more harm than good. My other concern was that it seems a bit "cheesy" to have some kind of "links directory" on a site similar to the one generated by LinkAssistant. Anyone have any thoughts on this and link building tools in general?

[AussieWebmaster]

The days of building directories are over. Unless you plan on launching a full blown DMOZ you are wasting your time.

[seopadawan]

So what's the recommended strategy these days? Links are still a huge part of SEO and I gotta get them somehow and put them somewhere, right?

[caily]

Just avoid things that can damage your reputation in the eyes of search engines like link to a bad neighborhood or known as link farms, suspicious looking websites or poor quality link exchanges, keyword stuffing, duplicate content and cloaking.

[jhen]

I don't think that reciprocal linking can harm a site as long as you know the details/information about the links. If links are good enough to link to, then you have nothing to worry about but of course, getting one-way links should be the first priority

[uTOPia]

The days of building directories are over. Unless you plan on launching a full blown DMOZ you are wasting your time.
hard to argue with an editor :) but I think you read too much of *seo gurus*, AussieWebmaster ;)

if you ever tried to promote a small niche website, you know that reciprocal linking still works even in 2008, and works great.

as for dmoz... well, i woudn't suggest to launch anything as dead as dmoz, seopadawan ;)

[seopadawan]

Thanks for all the advice. It sounds like carefully choosing Link Partners is the way to go, but where do I put their links on my site? I don't want to have one of these cheesy looking free-for all links directories? Is there a recommended way to do this?

[jhennie]

Hi..:)I suggest you to use 3 way links.