Link Building

Introduction

Link building is a fundamental aspect of SEO that involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (or simply a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use these links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Importance of Link Building

Link building is important because it is a major factor in how Google and other search engines rank web pages. Google notes that: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages." Imagine that we own a site promoting a film that we have made. We might want to get links from sites that review films, are involved in the film industry, promote upcoming films, or are otherwise related to our film.

How Link Building Works

In order to understand the importance of link building, it's important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them.

1. Start of link tag: Known as an anchor tag (hence the "a"), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.

2. Link referral location: The "href" stands for "hyperlink referral," and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn't always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you'll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These are local links, which take you to a different section of the page you're already on.

3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page, and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue color and/or underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.

4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.

Types of Link Building

There are many ways to build links to your website. At a high level, we can classify link-building methods into two basic categories:

1. Natural/Editorial Links: Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific SEO action from you, other than the creation of worthy material (great content) and the ability to create awareness about it.

2. Manual Outreach/Link Building: Links that are obtained through direct effort, such as getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content.

Strategies for Link Building

There are several popular strategies that businesses use to build links to their site.

1. Content Creation & Promotion: Create compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference and link to, and tell people about it. You have to spread the word before you can expect anyone to find your content and link to it!

2. Reviews & Mentions: Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with a large social media following.

3. Links from Friends & Partners: Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site. Remember that relevance matters; links from sites that are in the same general industry or niche as your site will have more value than links from random, unrelated sites.

Risks of Link Building

Link building can be risky if not done correctly. Google can penalize websites that participate in link building practices that are against its webmaster guidelines, which could result in a decrease in search rankings. Some risky link building tactics include buying links, excessive link exchanges, and using automated programs to create links.

Conclusion

Link building is a critical part of SEO, and it is important to understand and implement high-quality strategies. High-quality links can help you outrank your competitors and get you additional referral traffic. With the right approach, link building can be a win-win situation for everyone involved - the content producer gets their content spread across the web and the linker gets valuable content to share with their audience.