It was possible for a website to achieve high ranking without the use of link building of the highest quality. Recent Google updates put paid to this practice. One of the reasons why the link building was of an inferior quality was Often due to low quality links through article submissions. Article directories did not have strict guidelines, and many articles submitted were badly written, and contained bad grammar, punctuation, spelling etc. Article directories were simply a means of obtaining links for Google. This did work, as Google did count these links, and reward the website with high rankings. On many occasions, the same article would be submitted to thousands of directories. Web masters would merely write an article, and submit through an automatic tool.
Google-PageRank-Calvin-Ayre
However, this method did help a website to rank high in Google. This is no longer the case, and many websites that had a good ranking lost their rankings over night, as the only reason they had a good position was through spam links. Google now only wants quality websites to be displayed in the top ten positions. Google has made the message very clear to web masters that they want quality link building, and if you are building low quality, irrelevant links then Google will punish your website. When building back links to your website it very important to link to authority websites, as this will pass more link juice to your own website. SEO should always be consistent, and have a good back link profile from different sources.
There are of course still good article directories available with good PR. This includes Ezine, Articlebase and Go Articles. These article directories are also a good way to obtain traffic to your website. It is important to follow their guidelines. When submitting articles do not forget to add a link to your website. For example if you had an SEO company in the UK keywords that would be important would be SEO UK, SEO services UK or SEO company UK. The same would apply if you were looking for SEO package keywords would be applicable are SEO packages, SEO packages UK or best SEO packages Google has a helpful keyword tool which is handy to use, as it provides information about search volume of your keywords. Social media is also a new rage with SEO. Having strong social signals will help your website to rank higher on the search engines. The main social websites are Twitter, Google Plus. Facebook, and Youtube. The most important aspect of SEO is to build quality relevant links. All back links should be relevant to your website. Building correct back links to your website will give you long term benefits.
To sum up, the main difference between now and the past is that Google is much more sophisticated now, and no website can ever hope to reach page one with poor quality link building.