Tin Cup SEO

There are days when I look around the SEO blogging community and find nothing but articles about how to look at links, where to find links, and how to evaluate links. If I didn’t know better, I would be easily persuaded that search engine optimization is all about links.

Although it’s NOT all about links, search engine optimization has indeed been overtaken by link addiction. Addiction theory is a very real science with a great deal of research behind it. Link Addiction can be explained by basic Addiction Conditioning Theory: you get a slight rush when you obtain value-passing links and see them work in your favor.

Is the rush a splash of endorphins or something more esoteric? I’d stand on the side of the esoteric interpretation because the reinforcement comes from multiple factors. That is, not only are you rewarded in uncompetitive theories by employing competitive linking strategies, you are being inundated with bad information from every major SEO blog in the universe (when they send the message that “all you need are links”).

Search engine optimization becomes addicted to link building when link building becomes the primary focus of search engine optimization. Think about it: link building is the least efficient means of optimizing for search. Based on the amount of effort you have to put in, you’ll proportionately draw more search referral traffic from getting 500 words of text indexed than from obtaining one link from the front page of CNN, Yahoo!, or MSN.

Links can drive traffic by themselves and building links for the sake of the traffic they may provide makes all sorts of sense — but that’s not search engine optimization, that’s Web marketing. Web marketing strategies have to include but look beyond traffic that can be obtained through search. So you’re not addicted to links if you’re building traffic through links — that would be equivalent to saying you’re addicted to food and exercise because you’re building muscle and staying fit.

You’re addicted to links if linking is the core of your search optimization strategy. An addict has no perspective. Addicts rationalize inefficiencies and inconsistencies without hesitation.

There are some fairly universal signs of addiction. The Mayo Clinic article I link to talks about “drug addiction”, but let’s look at how link addiction can be described using their general signs.

• Feeling that you need links regularly and, in some cases, as many links as you can possibly obtain
• Making certain that you maintain a supply of links
• Failing repeatedly in your attempts to stop acquiring links
• Doing things to obtain the links that people normally wouldn’t do, such as dropping links in blogs. social media sites, and forums
• Feeling that you only need links to obtain your search optimization goals
• Putting your own or other people’s Web sites at risk in order to obtain as many links as possible

If you work for someone else and your primary responsibility is to build links, you’re not necessarily addicted to links. It’s your job.

If you develop search strategies based on link building, you have a linking problem. Either that or you don’t know what you’re doing.

Addicts don’t recognize that they have a problem, so getting link addicts to admit they have a problem isn’t easy. They can always choose to optimize in some other way, but they simply choose not to. Ask yourself this: since link building is the least efficient means of optimizing for search, does it make sense to devote most of your strategy to building links?

Here is a simple test anyone can take to see if they are addicted to links: optimize a Web site for search without relying on links. That doesn’t mean don’t obtain any links at all. It means limit yourself to obtaining no more than the minimum number of links necessary to be crawled, indexed, and maintain at least site name visibility. That is usually no more than 10-20 links.

If you find yourself justifying the acquisition of more than 15 links, you’re probably addicted. If you find yourself arguing that you need more than 20 links, you ARE addicted to links.

Any Web site, provided it has sufficient content, can attract a large amount of traffic from search without building links. All you need is to get the content indexed in search engines and they will start sending you random traffic.

If you can acquire 25 random search visitors a day, you can acquire 50. If you can acquire 50 random search visitors a day, you can acquire 100. If you can acquire 100 random search visitors a day, you can acquire 200. There is no limit to how much traffic you can obtain from search without building links.

This is the World Wide Web. We need links to be included in the Web and to participate in the Web ecosystem. We just don’t need that many links to be included in and participate in the search ecosystem.

Your search engine optimization may be inhibited by link addiction but it doesn’t have to be. If you can tear yourself away from the popular SEO linking myths and focus on the job that needs to be done, you can improve your linking efficiencies tremendously. Call that holistic Web marketing (it’s not about search engine optimization at this level).

Links are to SEO as SEO is to Web marketing: they’re just one tool in the shed, and not even the most important tool.

NOTE: Do you understand why I titled this post “Tin Cup SEO”?