How is your website’s backlink profile looking these days? Are you steadily garnering new links from a multitude of high-quality websites?

If you can’t answer those questions honestly, or you answered honestly with only a handful links not worth writing home about, then today’s post is strictly for you.

And don’t worry, I’ll go light on you although I probably shouldn’t.

Nevertheless, I’m providing you with the link building strategy round up that will do the following:

1. Inspire those of you that are not currently link building to get started if you have not a clue where to begin sound and search-safe link building
2. Give those of you a good swift kick in the pants if you’ve approach or manage ongoing link building in a lazy manner
3. Correct those of you who have gone towards the dark and wayward path of eating at the “all-you-can-link-buy” buffet

I encourage you to read, study, and re-read each link building post in this round up series.

If you have questions, then please don’t hesitate one bit to drop a comment at the end of this post.

It’ll be my pleasure to help answer any questions or concerns you may have as it pertains to sound and search-safe link building.

It’s the silver bullet to SEO: Automation.

Every small business owner would love for SEO to plan, implement, execute, measure and sustain itself automatically.

However, the truth and reality is that it doesn’t. The End.

Okay, there is more to it that just stating the obvious and calling it a day.

This doesn’t mean that certain aspects of SEO cannot be automated.

In fact, there are many aspects of SEO that can be automated.

But the wisdom in automating SEO is knowing what to automate and how to go about automation.

Blinded by future rankings and the expected tsunami of traffic to be receive moments after signing their SEO agreement, business owners fall prey to paying large sums of money for services that either can’t be rendered or are rendered and leave their website severely penalized or de-indexed by search engines.

Too many times, business owners and businesses fall victim to the ole’ foolproof SEO automatic packages that tout overnight page one rankings.

Instead of taking the time to invest in SEO for the long haul, most business owners opt for the silver bullet approach.

Now, I can’t stop you or any other business owner in search of SEO strategies and services from falling prey to automating SEO.

While you can automate some of your SEO actions, there are some SEO actions that you should never automate.

One of the things about search engine optimization (SEO) that never ceases to amaze me is the sheer ability of a business to underestimate the long-term consequences of their zig-zag, one-time SEO decisions.

What I mean by zig-zag decisions is a business’ ability to zig to implement the hottest or latest fad in SEO only to zag when the next best SEO tactic arrives for all to partake.

One of the problems with this type of SEO strategy is that it leaves you open and vulnerable to the long-term impact of negative SEO should the tactic become too popular and deemed black-hat SEO by search engine algorithms.

One of the things that drives me up a wall and back as an SEO professional is to have both potential and existing customers solely focus on the number of backlinks their competitors have achieved based on SEO tools.

I love SEO tools and I do use my fair share of SEO tools, but I realize that SEO tools cannot replace the hard work and effort that I must put into achieving and sustaining my rankings.

I use SEO tools as a gauge to monitor what SEO tactics are and are not working, but these SEO tools are not the end all, be all for how my website ranks across major search engines.

In most cases, people that are benchmarking using SEO tools are clearly wasting their time.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to benchmark and use SEO tools such as Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs.com, Moz, and OpenSiteExplorer.org to measure one’s website or compare one’s website to their competition.

The problem I have with customers using SEO tools is that most potential customers and customers are headed down the wrong or deceptive SEO path and proclaim SEO tools as the holy grail of SEO.

And why is this so bad, you ask? Well, any little discrepancy in the numbers or data shown by their desired SEO tool of choice causes such potential and existing customers to participate in reactive SEO, chasing things that don’t matter while neglecting to focus and stay the course executing sound SEO principles.

We all must remember that SEO is as fickle as the wind in general and especially can become a slippery slope when we start trying to use tools to reactively benchmark link building strategies.

That said, I wish most potential and existing customers would really take to heart and understand wholeheartedly what about about to say in the next paragraph.

Let me start by saying that as much guest posting and blogging craze that there is all over the web, I’m not real big on guest posts and blogs, period.

I’ll tell you why, but first a customer story.

If only I could rank #1 on page one of Google…

This long time customer once had stellar SEO rankings for multiple money keywords and long tail keywords in their industry.

For years, they owned search rankings with well-optimized pages and website in general.

In fact, this customer ranked so well across search engines that they didn’t have to participate in pay-per-click advertising although it would have been a benefit.

That all came to end after experiencing two failed SEO efforts and relationships with other companies.

In truth, all this customer wanted was establish their web presence as the number one spot in search rankings.

But is this not what we all want for our websites?

Everyone knows that SEO has always taken a beating over the years. SEO has been viewed as a necessary evil to grow one’s business in the age of internet marketing.

For most small businesses, SEO has been a nightmare experience with an industry full of nothing but money hungry crooks holding a website and search rankings hostage in lieu of thousands of dollars and empty promises.

The SEO industry, as is any other industry, has its share of good, bad and ugly players that market themselves as SEO ninjas, specialists, professionals, internet marketers, inbound marketers, and whatever other phrase of the month comes to mind to make a dollar.

As of late, the top buzzword or phrase of SEO has been content marketing, and how it’s becoming the new SEO and future of internet marketing.

So, just what is content marketing and why has it been coined the new SEO? I’m so glad you asked.

Do-it-yourself SEO, also known as DIY SEO, is one of the most popular phrases tossed around in small business as it relates to small businesses bootstrapping their own SEO efforts.

It seems like every few months I field an email or phone call where a small business has had some sort of prior experience with an SEO professional or agency.

Sometimes they are looking to perform their own SEO in house, or they want to discuss and understand whether their small business should perform DIY SEO or hire an SEO professional or agency.

Typically, their reason for calling me is to have Kickstart Commerce to perform a free SEO audit of their current website.

They either heard from another Kickstart Commerce customer of our free SEO audit service offering, or they were performing a DIY SEO or small business SEO services search online and found one of our website or blog search results.

I realize that offering free SEO audits are somewhat an opportunity for companies to try and take advantage of the offer, especially when they hide the fact that they are looking to perform DIY SEO.

For some, their hope is that I will give away the SEO farm without them having to pay one dime, while others are willing to pay Kickstart Commerce to perform audit findings and without much disagreement for pricing at all.

But today, I’ll share with you an experience that happened not too long ago with a company that had champagne taste on a sprite budget.

In short, this customer that wanted sound SEO and all the SEO trimmings, but was not willing to pay for the results they wanted.