Link Building is absolutely essential to successful SEO. When properly applied, Link Building can increase a website’s search engine position within sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, essentially bringing more visitors to the website. When defined, Link Building is the process of sharing links with other high traffic websites that are similar in content.
The relevance and quality of a website’s incoming links is of importance when a search engine is ranking a website. Simply put, the higher the link popularity, the higher the ranking for the website. The number of links pointing to a website defines that websites link popularity, thus the more incoming links a website boasts the higher, it higher it could be potentially ranked by search engines because that website will be seen as offering more relevant and reliable information. The page rank value system Google generally uses is a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest score.
Of equal importance is the placement of a website on search engines. The goal here is for the website to be as close to the top as possible of search engine results when keywords relevant to the sites content are entered. Link popularity is the main determining factor of a websites placement on search engine results, as this determines the websites importance in the search engine’s opinion.
Many companies will hire professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies to build and generate links for them as this task can be daunting and often unsuccessfully completed if a company is not willing to dedicate enough time to this project or is inexperienced in this area. Hiring an SEO company can benefit a website because the right SEO company knows the proper and effective way to link build and has insights into what search engines are looking for when determining the importance of a website. However, if a website decides to embark on a link building project on their own, they need to focus on generating links to their website from a variety of sources:
- Website Directories – Directories are often fee based and are designed to promote links for a company’s website. A link directory is a huge list of websites that is arranged into categories and sub-categories. Keep in mind there are also a lot of high quality free directories such as DMOZ.
- Social Networks – Generating links in this area will take time and skill, but when utilized properly can be quite an effective way of quickly establishing link popularity.
- Blogging – Generating link popularity using blogs can also be tricky, but is well worth the time spent.
- Article Sites – You can build links using this tool by taking keywords within the article and making them clickable links. Article writing will not only display a company’s expertise and knowledge in a given area, but will also generate relevant traffic to the website and thus increasing a website’s page ranking and importance in the eyes of search engines.