What is Link Building?

If you want a thriving and competing online business, building high-quality links is essential. Link building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks from other websites and adding them to your own. A link is a means for users to navigate between multiple pages on the internet. Building links is a difficult task, and for this reason, masting the art of creating high-quality links will set you above both your competition and other SEOs.

Why is Link Building Important for SEO?

Fundamentally, the mechanics of link building need to be understood to see why they are so crucial for SEO. Four components make up the basics of link building and how search engines see and interrupt from them.

1. Start of link tag “Anchor tag”: This opens the link tag and signals the search engines that a link to something will appear.

2. Link referral location “hyperlink referral”: “Href” stands for “hyperlink referral”, and the URL that the link is pointing is in the text within quotation marks. Besides a web page, an image or a file to download can also be linked. Local links will begin with a # sign inside of a URL, and they will take you to another section of the page.

3. Visible/anchor text of link: As the name indicates- this text can be easily found on the page and needs to be clicked on to open the link. The text is specially formatted to stand out from its surrounding text, e.g. underlined or in blue to indicate it is clickable.

4. Closure of link tag: To search engines, this is the sign that says it is the end of the link tag.

What do Links Mean for Search Engines?

Search engines use links to discover new web pages and to help determine how well a page should rank in its results. Search engines scour pages on the internet and collect the content they find on the web and add it to their indexes. This method determines whether the page quality is adequate to be ranked high for relevant keywords. When determining rank, the number of links pointing to the page and the quality of the websites is also considered.  To be awarded a high rank in search results, it is helpful to have high-quality websites linking towards you.

Google has been the dominating search engine since the late 1990s, and this attributed to the fact that links are a ranking factor. PageRank was created by one of Google’s founders and naturally implemented by Google to measure the quality of a page based on the number of links pointing to it. A link is interrupted as a vote of confidence about a page. When someone links another website, they are sending a bold message that they consider the page to be of high-quality. This metric has been adopted as a ranking algorithm and is exceptionally useful. Recently, Google has begun to penalise websites that exploit techniques in their link building to optimise the keyword search. With this in mind, it is vital that when link building, you are aware of the techniques to reframe from using to adhere to Google’s guidelines.

The benefits of link building to your business

Now that we’ve established the importance of links for search engines determining rankings, we can also look at the other domino effect of benefits. Firstly, a good link will help you in building your brand and establishing your place in your chosen field. This is achieved by content creation which a link building technique that will highlight your companies expertise and advertise your excellence. Another benefit is that you are simultaneously building business relationships as the link building process involves outreach to other websites in your field. This outreach is a form of promotion of your companies expertise. Building relationships with others in your market is also indicative of a business that is worthy of trust. This, in turn, brings us to the third benefit, which is sending referral traffic. A good link from a popular website will result in traffic, especially if the website is relevant to your field.

If you want to be seen as a strong competitor and ensure the future of your business, then it is vital that you build links to your company, and to build links well to gain the full benefit of this metric.

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