How many days/hours a month should I dedicate to link building ?

[SEOBunny_]

I realise that the more time you dedicate to link building the better, but what would you say is the ideal amount of time that I should spend link building to see a significant improvement in rankings? The keywords I'm trying to target are medium to difficult.

So far, I've been spending one day link building but since I'm making all link submissions manually, I haven't seen great results, even though I've been link building for a couple of months. How many days do you spend link building?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[MarieHaynes]

The game is changing for SEO's now.  With the latest Google algo updates, it has become that the vast majority of links that you can create by yourself are not going to be worth much, and possibly could even get you a penalty.

Personally, I spend most of my time brainstorming and then creating content and then promoting that content.  In some niches I do the odd directory submission where I feel it is relevant and helpful.

I still do some guest posting but my gut instinct is that a lot of guest posting will be devalued soon.  (Many here will disagree with me.) But I look at it like this: Google's algo updates lately have all revolved around reducing the effectiveness of self made links.  So, if a guest posting opportunity is easy to get then it may not be that helpful.  However, getting a guest post published on a well known site like seomoz or others that have high editorial input may be helpful.

[JustDucky]

@ Marie : I agree with you about much of what I'm observing about guest blogging.  I get neg'd whenever I say so.  Many people must disagree.  But G appears to be culling the heard of sites.  (I expect this trend to continue and the price of entry into the game to continue to steadily increase). The sites that post a couple of articles a day utilizing entirely guest authored blogs who are likely to be devalued substantially in the next 1 - 2 years regardless of their DA/PA or psuedo-PR.

@ SEO Bunny - It's increasingly coming down to who you know.   I'd start by approaching my friends within my industry who also have blogs.   Although the stats of many of these sites are quite low (I'm not a prof. SEO), some of them may improve over time and the contextual links will be HIGHLY relevant to both sites because both of the sites concern the same fairly narrow topic. In a sense, these links are "harder" to get.  There will be few OBL's to brand sites because of the level of trust / personal relationship required.

[Joe_Nickdow]

SEOBUNNY,

I guess the best anwser to that questions is an 'it depends'.

I agree with the other posters that guest posting relevant content is probably among the best strategys as long as they are not just glorified directories. As they also said, with penguin, if you are submitting to some directories, they can hurt you. If you're a local business I would try getting some links from local organizations such as chambers of commerce, newspaper websites, local business organizations, etc. Those should be safe links.

A lot really depends on your type of business as-well. Some will have more link building opportunities than others. Also, try to write the best content possible and hopefully some of it gets picked up by legit sites. It's really a value for value thing, when you're putting value out there, you'll get some value in terms of rankings.

Good Luck! If you need any help you can PM me.