Link Building Explained

Why link build?

All sites who want to rate high on a search engine results page need at least a few links, regardless of how competitive their keywords are. The more one-way links a web site has, the more reliable the search engine algorithms consider it to be.

The more quality links you have the better search engines rank you -

The rule is the more competitive the keyword the more links you will need. For competitive keywords, link building is the single most important element to obtaining high rankings in all of the major search engines (content to keyword relevancy also is weighted very high).

Links act as gateways –

Gateways are access points (via links) into your website. Nothing to do with security – just a name for how people find out about your site and then go to it. This can be links on external sites to yours (backlinks), knowing the website name from a flyer or simply word-of-mouth.

Now for an analogy

• Imagine there is a 5 mile long wall with one small gate – only a few people will be able to find that gate and if they have never heard of what is through the gate then why go though it?
• Now imagine there are 200 gates all along the wall with signs beside each gate saying where it leads and what they can do once they get through it.
• What happens = more people go through the (now) many gates, as they don’t have to walk as far to get through, and they also now know what is on the other side, therefore enticing them in.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of having another website or just a single webpage linking to your site from theirs.

There are 3 types of links:

• One-way links – The best – Having site A linking to site B. Google and other search engines generally rate these higher these days, therefore they rate you higher.
• Reciprocal links – Having site A link to site B and site B to site A (2-way linking). Still beneficial as the search engines won’t ignore these links and also they serve to increase user traffic from the other websites link to you, but One-Way links are the real players these days and are what search engines like Google look for. Reciprocal links are not massively beneficial for SEO , but as stated they serve their purpose in increasing gateways into your website.
• 3-way links – Site A links to site B. Site B links to site C. Site C links to site A.

Other terms you may come across are:

• “External links” or “Outgoing links” – Links going out of a website to another website.
• “Internal links” or “On-site links” – Links to other webpage’s within your website.
• “Backlinks” or” Incoming links” – Links coming into a webpage from external sites. We use the term “backlink” regularly because the more backlinks a webpage has the higher rated it is by a search engine

There are 2 genres of links to your site:

1. Quality Links - Gaining links from sites that are ranked highly by search engines (this can be measured by seeing if the site itself is at the top of a search result for a competitive keyword and also a high page rank can be a good indication) but low external link counts. Some examples are low ranked pages, directory submissions, blog posting, article submission, forum posting and social media links.
2. Quantity Links - Quantity links are the many links to a site that may not be thought of currently as high importance by search engines. Increase site traffic

Quality & Quantity Links Mix

Have a mix of building some high quality links along with many quantity links. The quantity links will backup the quality ones in a search engine query.

Note. If you have a brand new site, and if you start acquiring thousands of backlinks in a short period of time, your site may get in trouble with search engine filters. This practice will not look natural to search engines, and your site will not fully benefit from the backlinks you have acquired.