Building links to a web site has become a lost art over the years. Recent developments in the Internet Marketing world, like the emergence and development of automated submission programs, the overwhelming amount of black-hat and immoral link building tactics, and other factors has made it appear that, when it comes to search engine marketing, the mentality of “the easier the better” is the right one to have.

This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Google and other search engines do take note of what tactics you or your search engine marketing company are using when promoting your website and attempting to improve traffic and lead conversion. And when they notice things like duplicate content, link farming and spamming for links, and other tactics that have been frowned upon in the past, your site will be penalized. Here are the top of what not to do when building links to your website:

5. Mass directory submissions.

Google and other search engines have all but stated that non-niche directory sites that anyone with an internet connection can submit to are low on the totem pole. Even worse than submitting to them: submitting to all of them at once, all with the same descriptions and titles. If you go the directory route, take the time to make them unique, usually five at a time.

4. Focusing all of your link builidng efforts on blog commenting.

If you’re one of those people who think that only dofollow links matter, then you’ve recently realized that blogs allowing dofollow comments are one of the only resources still available. The amount of “link juice” that these comments is debatable, so focusing ALL link building efforts on this technique can be ill-advised. When you do blog commenting, keep it in good taste. Don’t put a long-tail keyword as the name of the commenter, don’t shamelessly self-promote in the text field, and add something relevant to the conversation. In other words: actually read the post before dropping a comment.

3. Submitting your site to non-relevant sites

You may know plenty of friends and colleagues with websites, but submitting your site to these sites which have nothing to do with your product or service offering would be shooting yourself in the foot. When search engine spiders notice that you’re being linked from a site that has nothing to do with yours, you can be penalized.

2. Focusing all of your link building efforts on social bookmarking

This goes back to the mentality mentioned in number four: if everyone can do it, it usually isn’t as effective. There are plenty of sites out there that will help streamline the social bookmarking submission efforts and throw a blog post or article out to a million different social bookmarking sites. Only use the top social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and other trusted bookmarking sites when using this link building technique, and if you use a number of them, change up the descriptions and titles.

1. Buying links

This seems to be Google and other search engine’s ultimate no-no. It is no secret that a number of sites have been penalized dramatically for buying text links on other sites. Stay away from http://TextLinkAds.com and other link brokers, it may seem like you get what you pay for and that others are having success with this method, but if spiders find a footprint to or from your site and it seems like you have bought links from another site or broker, you can be penalized dramatically.