What is Link Building?
Link building is actually a highly valued part of search engine optimisation and it is the way in which Google and other search engines actually determine the order in which they rank the web pages for searched keywords and phrases.
In order to make your website more visible to the search engines then it is important that you do think about link building and implement it into your internet marketing strategy. When talking about link building a term you will often here from SEO consultants is link popularity and this refers to the number of links which point to a website and where they actually originate from.
Why is link popularity important?
It is of extreme importance that you note where your links are coming from. Many other SEO companies may well say that they can get you a hundred links to your site however, what we say to our clients is if these are all from dodgy sites then it isn’t going to do all that much.
You need to gain links from websites which are similar to your own as these are a lot better quality than gaining links from irrelevant sites. Links from sites which are popular with the search engines are seen as more valuable and can boost your own search engine rankings.
The majority of visitors to your site will click through from a search engine rather than links on other sites however, some will come through off other sites and if as mentioned above they are popular then you could see these links generating traffic and every bit of traffic that you can get helps! Having large numbers of quality links to your site will make the search engines perceive your site as being more important.
This will result in a higher page rank even if the links aren’t generating mass amounts of traffic. There are two types of links:
Reciprocal Links, these are exchanged with other websites and it works by you linking to them and they then link back to you. Although these are helpful they are not as useful as they once were in the past.
Non-Reciprocal Links, these are links which point to your website from another site which yours doesn’t link back to and these are the ones which are considered important by search engines. If people link to you without expecting a link back the search engines recognise you as an authoritative source of information.
These non-reciprocal links are the most valuable and most sought after links but it is important to note that reciprocal links though not important they still matter. Another thing which matters is keywords which you optimise for as link building works using these as a foundation to build upon.