Link building
Overview
Link building helps search engines to confirm the quality of your website by association. If you have links leading to your site from reputable third-party sources, it’s a bit like receiving a vote of confidence from important and influential figures in the real world.
This is for you if…
You want your website to appear higher on search engine results pages. Aiming for this will naturally lead to your website experiencing more traffic.
There are other benefits. The act of link building often involves reaching out to influencers in your industry, which can help foster strong relationships. If a popular website links to yours, it can provide a significant boost to your visitor numbers. This in turn will help increase awareness of your brand.
This is why you need it...
Search engine algorithms, like those used by Google, are complex and always evolving. This means link building operates within an ever-changing landscape.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to attract backlinks to your website. Doing it naturally (i.e. by not paying for links) can be a slow and time-consuming process.
Link building should be developed as a strategy and as part of your overall SEO, alongside:
- the creation and promotion of great content
- getting your content in front of industry influencers
- forming high value partnerships within your industry.
In addition to attracting external links, internal link building (between different pages of your site) and inclusion of optimised anchor text (i.e. the actual words displayed in a hyperlink) also need consideration. In short, link building requires analysis, knowledge and insight in order to succeed.
Link building explained...
Link building is the process of getting other websites to include a link to your site. From a practical perspective, this can be a good thing for visitors to the other site: they just need to click the link to reach you. However, the real power and value of a backlink comes from the way a search engine interprets it.
When a search engine bot crawls a web page, it extracts information about the page. After indexing the page, it decides how to rank it for search queries containing specific keywords.
However, other factors are also considered in the ranking process. These include how many inbound links the page has from other websites, and what sorts of websites those links come from. For example, a link from a government site or well-known journalism outlet, like the BBC, is going to carry a great deal more kudos than a link from a brand-new website experiencing little traffic.
In short, the more renowned, authoritative and relevant the websites are that link to yours, the better you should rank in search results – and the better your website will perform.
