There’s no doubting the part that SEO copywriting plays in link building. As an ‘off-page’ SEO technique, it nevertheless calls for copywriting skills of the highest order – not forgetting the need for a strategic mindset and a long term commitment to gradually growing the number of high quality, industry-relevant links that point to your site.

The emphasis Google places on links is based on the idea that more people will want to link to a ‘quality’ site. The more links a site has, therefore, the more worthy it is of higher rankings in the search results pages (SERPS).

Quite simply, it’s the techniques that are used to link high quality, industry-relevant websites to yours! SEO link building is the process of steadily adding to the number of sites that create those all-important inbound links. And although there are many ways to create links, Buzzwords focuses on three main areas:

• Directory Submissions
• Article Marketing
• Online PR

This is the logical first step to take with any new website. SEO link building with Directory Submissions is relatively quick and painless!

The directory everyone talks about is DMOZ (aka The Open Directory Project). This is the Holy Grail for link building. A listing in DMOZ will give your website fast-track connections to all the major search engines.

The Yahoo Directory is well used and influential. To submit your site will cost a thumping $300 per year, with no guarantee it will be accepted. Also, the word on the street has it that The Yahoo Directory is not the force it once was.

There are many other free directories such as directoryvault.com, visitalink.com and so on, as well as those directories that are relevant to your own profession or industry. A good starting point to find out what the options are is to examine which directories your competitors are linking to.

This is arguably the most effective of link building techniques – although murmurs of duplicate content penalties have been voiced of late. Google, however, has scotched rumours that webmasters will be liquidated as a result of other directories and websites ‘scraping’ their articles!

The benefits of article marketing do, of course, go well beyond the mere multiplication of links – desirable though that is. Well-written (and cleverly optimised) articles, with keywords in all the right places, can achieve significant rankings in their own right, as well as setting your company apart as experts in your particular field.

Recent research has shown that the benefit of being featured in the less well-known article directories isn’t worth the time and effort that goes into it. For best results in terms of traffic and inbound links, stick to the likes of ezine-Articles, Buzzle, Article Alley and Go Articles.

The ‘easy’ link building benefits of online PR stem directly from the fact that most online directories will publish a news release, even if it’s of average quality – and there’s no limit to the number of releases you can submit. That’s obviously because there’s an infinite amount of space in cyberspace, compared to the confines of a trade magazine or national journal.

There are drawbacks with this, not least the fact that the links you acquire may be neither high quality nor relevant enough for them to make a significant difference to your website’s ranking with the likes of Google.

Online PR has the benefit of speed of uptake. Your news could be online within minutes of submission, and there are also the other SEO aspects which could see well-optimised news releases featuring well in the organic listings (SERPS) – especially if the release is issued by newswires such as PRWeb or PRNewswire.

SEO is an ongoing process, and link building is probably the one aspect of SEO that requires the most time for results to show through and demonstrate a tangible return on investment (ROI). When used with other SEO copywriter skillsets, however, the strategic approach that is all part of the SEO link building mindset will always pay off.