Link building for rankings VS Link building for relationships

[helpwanted]

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A Big Shout To Everyone -- Good Morning and What's Up

As I read today through seomoz professional guide to link building and the section why link building matters and in addition to this a newsletter I received today that changed my whole thinking towards link building for rankings vs for relationships. It is already happening on social networks if you are active there, but what about on your website.

What are your thoughts on the following ?

Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query !

Webmasters Site Objective:
I think that we as webmasters have to ask ourselves what do we want to achieve with link building. To get quick traffic or build slow authority links, high rankings, lead generation, sales & other things here I may be missing etcccc

Other Objective  Networking & Relationship Building Alliances :

What I discovered today is that building links for 1st page rankings are great and will provide me with steady traffic, but not all of it is targeted traffic, but what else can I do to bring targeted traffic and at the same time try to build alliances with other related non competing business owners online.

The idea... is to apply old school networking / relationship building alliances to get targeted traffic to my site that can actually benefit from my services.

How Do We Achieve This

I become a editor for approving resource links for me site, only the best will be placed on my site as a resource. Build  a valuable tightly themed categorized resource section with related non competing resources that can help my sites visitors find what they are looking for, send visitors to non competing resources that may purchase their services which helps me build a relationship with them, and may can with rankings as well, provided I am selective with my qualification process.

Questions & Concerns Below :

• What should I be thinking about when creating a resource categorized links page
• How many outgoing do follow links should I allow from this links partner page
• How will this links resource page affect my own SE 1st Page Rankings and is it worth it based on getting targeted traffic
• Any pros / cons I may be missing here

[helpwanted]

Hi Jordan...

Ok...Jordan thanks for your feedback and making a great suggestion. I will now give some thought to this further and see how I can use this suggestion as well.

However, I am probably not using the right name for this page, probably Resource Page is a much better word since this is what I actually provide since it is not just a worthless links page, it is actually a valuable resource page that I take out time to sort and sift through the junk from the gold nuggets.

Now google's objective is provide the best possible relevant results and this is why they are the best and I can help them do that then I am actually helping them provide their users a better experience and better relevant results.

And if I set up a highly tight niche resource page, with well defined categories for easy navigation and discovery of resources my audience are actually looking for or may be interested in, I just helped google provide better relevant results for the surfer and my visitor to my site.

He may leave my site, but I was the one that helped him or her find what they were looking for due to a highly tight category sections I have created for my audience.

Now keep in mind that I am also trying to network and create a business alliance with other business owners by what I am doing, it is not just about links and ranking for me with the resource page, if I did my job right and selected the right resource link I should get some targeted traffic from them as well as they will do from me.

My mistake naming it Link Partners page -- newbie at work here So now that I have clarified what the name of the page should be, and how it should be structured into a tight categorized resource page should this not help me with that networking aspect but also with the search engines since I am providing relevant content links that the visitor is actually looking for or may be interested in.

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My response to you question:

However, think to yourself -- when is the last time you found someones "link exchange" page and read all the way down it and clicked on a link which was just what you wanted. It hasn't happened very much for me.

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Was the resource page well tightly categorized and limited only to maybe 50 or tops 100 links not just all rolling down the page but with actual categories - do you think that would have got some one to click on a specific category instead and roll down maybe 10 to 20 specific links they are interested since they clicked a specific category !

Now could that badge idea still be used with what I want to do ....build a highly tight niche specific category resource section...;>) Giving some thought to this idea and how this idea can be used with what I am trying to achieve...hummm....:>)

What I am nervous about at times is whether google will look at my highly tight well categorized resource section as simply a link exchange and penalize me for it, I do not believe so since I did my job to select good related categorized resources for my visitors at the same time I have also applied networking principles via my resource page.

[JordanGodbey]

I think you were on to something in the first part of your discussion. Especially when you were talking about :

Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query !

However, think to yourself -- when is the last time you found someones "link exchange" page and read all the way down it and clicked on a link which was just what you wanted. It hasn't happened very much for me.

You would be better off creating "sections" somewhere on your site for partners and doing something different than a list of links (curated or not).

You could create a sidebar that says something like "Approved website designers" and add a few of their logos as links to their site and potentially ask that they do the same.

This kind of gets into the "badge" strategy that a lot of SEOs employ for link bait.

I think you're somewhat on the right track, but going down the "link partners" path isn't the right way to go in my opinion.