An Introduction To Link Building & Its Importance
The aspect of SEO and Link Building is ever-changing, and today, building high-quality links is more important now than ever. To compete and thrive online, understanding and implementing high-quality campaigns is vital. This scenario isn’t changing anytime soon. In this blog, we are going to discuss all link building and its importance. Whether you are a newbie or have already tried your hands on link building, there is a lot you can learn from here.
What Is Link Building?
Link Building can be defined as a process of obtaining hyperlinks (typically referred to as links only) from other websites to your own site. A hyperlink helps users in navigating between different pages on the internet.
Search Engines crawl the web using links, they’ll crawl the links between the separate webpages on your site, and they’ll crawl the links between all the websites. There are multiple tactics for link building, and while they all differ in difficulty level, most SEO Professionals agree that link building is the most challenging part of their jobs. So if you master this art, it puts you ahead in the competition.
Importance Of Link Building In SEO
Search Engines use links in two primary ways:
- To find new web pages
- To help decide how a page should rank in the SERPs
Once the search engines are done crawling the web pages, the content of those pages is derived and added to the search engine’s indexes. Then they can easily determine whether the page satisfied a certain quality level to be ranked for the relevant keywords or not. Moreover, during this whole process, the search engines do not just consider the content of a page but also the number of links pointing to it from external sites and also the quality of all those external websites. In a nutshell, the more high-quality external sites link to your website, the more are your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.
In the late 90s, the main reason why Google began dominating the search engine market was its strategy of using links as a ranking factor. Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, invented PageRank, which was used by Google as a metric to measure the quality of a page based on the number of links pointing to it. Soon this factor was added under the overall ranking algorithm, and it became a strong sign as this was an excellent method of determining page quality.
The reason behind its success was that if a website is linking to another site, it means they regard it as a reliable source. A page wouldn’t get external links if it weren’t deserving enough.
However, soon SEO professionals figured out a way to manipulate PageRank and search results for selected keywords. As a response, Google also started mapping out ways to discover sites that were trying to manipulate search results. It started rolling out regular updates aimed at separating out websites that were not deserving enough to rank.
Recently, Google has begun penalizing websites that are attempting over-optimization (overusing of techniques) in their link building. This is why it is essential to know which tactics you need to stay clear of to stay within Google’s guidelines.
Ways In Which Link Building Can Benefit Your Business
As mentioned earlier, the search engines utilize links to determine a site’s rankings. So that implies that the more is the number of links pointing to your website, the better is your chances of ranking significantly well in the search results.
However, there are some other benefits of link building as well. Although they might not be noticeable immediately, they are worth considering, as, in the long term, it will reap you greater rewards.
- Building Relationships
More likely than not, link building will involve seeking other relevant sites and blogs in your industry. Although the intention behind this seeking out is to promote something that you have recently developed, such as content and get a link, that’s not all. Doing so can help you in building long-term relationships with the leading influencers in your industry, which will establish your brand as a more trusted and highly regarded entity. Now this itself is a treasured addition to a brand’s reputation in the market.
- Sending Referral Traffic
We are aware of the impact of links on a website’s rankings, but what about the referral traffic? Getting a high-quality link from a popular website will ultimately generate more traffic for your website. Now, if the site is relevant, the traffic is likely to be relevant too, which might even lead to a boost in your sales as well. So once more, the link building is not just valuable for SEO but also for expanding your customer base.
- Building Your Brand
Effective link building can help in building your brand and establishing you as a credible authority in your industry. Employing certain link building strategies like content creation can demonstrate the expertise of your company to the audience and establish you as a leader in your niche.
For instance, if you create and publish a blog based on the industry data, the chances are that you will become well-known for that in your niche. When you seek out to get external links to that piece of content, you are manifesting your expertise and asking others in your industry to do the same by spreading the word about it.
So, this was all about link building and its importance. However, there is one thing that you must keep in mind before proceeding that all link building campaigns must begin with something valuable, something worth linking to. Acquiring links for web pages with low value can be a tough challenge. But when you start your campaign with something truly valuable, engaging, and informative, people will automatically share it. In that case, you won’t be “building” links you will be “earning” links!
Let us know your opinions about the link building in the comments below. We hope this information was useful for you.