Getting a high ranking on search engine results is important to the success of your online business. Although there are many ways of achieving this goal, link building has proven from time and again to be one of the best strategies you can use. However, if you are new to this strategy, there is quite a lot to take in.
What is link building?
Link building is defined as the process of acquiring quality hyperlinks from other websites to your site. The hyperlink is a way for users to navigate easily between web pages. Search engines use the links to crawl through websites. There are many ways of building links and SEO experts have admitted that building backlinks is one of their hardest tasks.
While researching link building, you will also come across the term backlinks. These are links that direct to your website. They are also known as inbound links. More backlinks indicate that your website is important or more popular. Google considers websites with more backlinks to be more relevant. As a result, the more backlinks you have, the better the ranking your website will have.
Why is link building important for search engine optimization?
Back in the late ‘90s, Google invented PageRank. This was a way of measuring the quality of a website based on the number of links that pointed to it. The metric was later incorporated into the ranking algorithm. This is what enabled Google to dominate the search engine market. The metric is still in use today although it has changed significantly over the years.
Today, for link building to work for you, you have to be very careful of the websites you link to. If some of the websites you have linked with have a negative reputation, this will rub off on your website. It is required to review a website before allowing it to link to you. There are many more link building techniques that Google has discounted over the years. For example, submitting your site to a directory then getting a link is no longer an option today. Less value is passed to such links.
Link building is important because when search engines are calculating the relevance of a website to certain keywords, they first consider the number of inbound links that come to the site. This means although backlinks are important, their quality matters. Search engines determine the quality of the links by considering whether the content on the other site is related to yours. If the content is unrelated, the links are considered irrelevant.
SEO services use strategies that enable them to determine the relevance of a website before linking with it. The entire history of a website is considered. Therefore, if you are new to link building or need help, working with an SEO company is the best decision you can make. This will keep you from being penalized and safeguard your online reputation.
How link building will benefit your business?
In addition to boosting your search engine ranking, there are other benefits that come with link building that you may not notice immediately. They include the following:
Building relationships
In link building, you have to reach out to other websites and blogs that are relevant to yours. This leads to promotions. The other party will want to learn more about you and you will also need to do the same. In so doing, you both get to understand something that you both never knew you had. This can help build relationships that are long-term and once that go beyond the Internet.
Referral traffic
In addition to helping with search engine indexing, backlinks will send you referral traffic. The value here goes beyond SEO When a visitor finds a link that is relevant to what they are reading, they will click on it. This will in turn redirect traffic from that website to the one that is linked to it. This will boost traffic to your website.
Brand building
When your new brand is mentioned on a reputable website, people will have more confidence contacting you. This is because if the website they trust knows about you, they will be more comfortable working with you too. What is more is that when your brand name is featured on a reputable website that receives a lot of traffic, more people will be able to learn more about you.
Link building is still an important part of search engine optimization. When done right, the strategy will boost your ranking on search engine, boost the reputation of your website and also increase traffic to your site. All in all, your link building campaigns must always begin with something that is worth linking to. Make sure you understand the pros and cons each link building strategy and do your research on the website you plan on linking with.