Link Building 101: What Is It And Why Is It Important?

Link Building 101

Link building is defined as the process in which marketers acquire hyperlinks for their own websites from other websites. The “link” in link building stands for the different hyperlinks acquired, and the building part of the term is defined as establishing linkages for your website in relation to other websites. Link building is classified as a technique or activity that falls under search engine optimization or SEO, and is unarguably one of the most complex components of SEO. If you have been newly introduced to the term, or are looking to outsource services, Globex Outreach link building services are well-known in the industry as professional and reliable service providers.

Hyperlinks are essentially a medium for search engine crawlers to navigate from one webpage to another – this may be between individual web pages on your website, or between different websites altogether. An important factor to note in SEO and link building is that their landscape is rapidly changing and newer techniques are introduced in the field on a daily basis. In order to plan, execute and launch link building campaigns, marketers need to stay updated with the ever changing requirements and dimensions of link building. This is because Google regularly updates the parameters on the basis of which it ranks websites to ensure only good quality and relevant content is shown on their search engines and marketers need to stay updated accordingly.

Why is link building important?

Link building is important for websites and companies in order to improve search engine optimization efforts, and is fundamentally important because search engines uses links in two ways: to discover new web pages and to understand and determine page rankings in search results. Once crawlers sponsored by search engines go over web pages, they simply extract the content in those web pages and add that to their respective indexes. The keywords from that content are extracted and then the search engine decides how relevant those keywords are for searches and hence the respective ranking is determined.

How is ranking on search engines determined by link building?

While deciding the respective ranking, in addition to looking for relevant keywords they also look for the number of hyperlinks from external websites that point towards that web page or in other words “vouch” for it hence adding to its credibility. The credibility assigned to your website is dependent on the credibility of the website pointing towards you. One of the earliest measures of ranking a page depending on the links was PageRank, created by Larry Page and it was essentially used to rank a page and assess its quality by calculating the number of links that point towards it.

The main idea behind this concept is that if an external website points towards you, they are essentially using and citing you as a resource. The higher the number of websites that point towards you as a resource, the higher is the value of content available on your website and web pages. However, this technique has a loophole associated with it and people were able to manipulate the rankings by adding relevant keywords to their website surrounding poor quality content. Hence, the Google algorithm kept updating itself and came up with newer techniques to rank web pages.

In addition to coming up with newer ranking measures, Google also penalizes websites that try to wrongly manipulate Google’s search ranking modules. This penalization is in the form of decreasing their page ranking on search engines or removing them from their indexes altogether.

How will link building help your business grow?

Link building is extremely important for the growth of your business – since link building determines search engine rankings and search engine rankings are essential if you want your customer market to find you, you need to build links for your website. While increasing your website’s ranking on search engines is one of the most immediate and major benefits of link building, other benefits that are evident in the long term include:

1.    Link building helps you build relationships

Link building helps you build relationships with relevant websites, industry blogs and other top players within and outside your industry. This relationship building helps companies when they are looking to launch a new product or service and could use some help in promoting it.  Outreach and link building activities help companies significantly in the long run as they help them establish linkages with key influencers in their specific industries, and are likely to make use of such linkages in the long run as well. These influencers can act as evangelists and brand ambassadors for their company. They will act as supporters and give credibility to your newly launched products and services in the long run.

2.    Link building sends referral traffic to your website

Link building sends referral traffic to your website – if you build links with reputable and high traffic websites, traffic from them is likely to make its way on your website as well in the form of referral traffic. Especially if the external website is relevant to your company and your website, you will most likely get relevant referral traffic and help drive the sales of your company. Referral traffic is also important as you simply cannot rely on Google’s ranking to gain traffic on your website –  you need to pursue alternative forms of marketing which may include paid promotions, promoted advertisements and referral traffic.

3.    Link building helps you build your brand and company

Link building helps you build your company’s brand – this is done by establishing yourself as an authority in your respective niche and acquiring the trust and credibility of the general public by ranking highly on search engines. An essential part of link building is content creation, which allows a company to exhibit the expertise of their company and to allow individuals to gain knowledge and attain help from the content that the company puts out. For instance, if a company creates a research article on their specific industry and the research article is widely used amongst the general public for reference or learning purposes, chances are that the company would be applauded for its effort and this would hence contribute towards brand building.