Link Building: Back to the Basics

What is Link Building?

Link building is a process of placing a website links on other sites on the web. It is a website promotion technique which is done with the intention of improving volume of traffic to a website. It facilitates or encourages the addition of links from one website to another.

Search engine rankings are understood to be heavily dependent on the number and quality of in-bound links to it. “Link Building” is the pro-active garnering of these links, through request, purchase, or link exchange.

Why links are so important?

Link building helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites which increases sales.

Link benefits you by way of getting direct traffic to your website. Incoming links from other websites would surely pay high dividends, as users are likely to click on that link and visit your website, thus bringing you direct traffic. The links placed on relevant pages would enhance the amount of relevant traffic to your website. A well planned Linking Building Campaign can also help you target your potential customer market and thus increasing the amount of valuable traffic to your site and thus even help improve your sales to some extent.

Link building helps in creating awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.

This plays a significant role in the visibility of the website. If you want to build brand awareness for your business name use it in the anchor text of your article resource box or when commenting on other blogs and forums. Also, if users see your link on a popular or respected site, their level of trust in what you say or what you offer is likely to be higher.

Links helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Links provide simple navigation to a search engine and help to index your site. A link enables your site to rank higher in Search Engines with competitive keywords. Major search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN rely on off-page factors such as Link building to determine how important your site is in order to rank it in search results.

The site also obtains wider search engine exposure.

Link Building gives your website wider search engine coverage. In many Search engines you might have not submitted your website, but in due course of time, the search engines will identify and pick up links to your website from other websites they recognize and index your site. This includes some important paid search engines (such as MSN, Askjeeves) that you may not have submitted your website to them. All search engines do not list your website for free, but would pick a link to your website from other websites they recognize, and eventually list your website in their result pages.

Links add value to your property.

Your website is your internet property, and it has value. What gives your website a value is the amount of traffic the site can generate. As links are one of the most important factors in generating substantial website traffic, search engine rankings, trust and more. A substantial link network offers significant value to the overall package when determining a website’s value.

Link helps to increase PageRank of a webpage.

PageRank is Google’s measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. By undertaking a long-term link building campaign, you can boost your website’s PageRank and improve your website’s ranking significantly. Most other major search engines have adopted this logic in their own algorithms in some form or the other, varying the importance they assign to this value in ranking websites in their search engine result pages. Search Engines consider your website more important if more links point to your website.