The single most common piece of advice for search engine marketing is to build inbound links. And that’s exactly what it is – a piece of advice. There can be no question that building inbound links (also known as "inlinks") is a crucial part of developing your website marketing strategy. But this advice is very much incomplete.

Today, Aaron Wall posted a great blog entry discussing the evolution of SEO. The meat of the entry is from a post on Webmaster World which describes the development of real and synthetic authority in the form of a parable.

One fundamental point is that a link building strategy is inevitably long-term. It takes time to build industry trust and to demonstrate that your site deserves appropriate links.

After reading this article, and along with several articles by Jim Boykin, Rand Fishkin, and others, I’ve been prompted to write an article discussing link building, posted in the articles section of this site.