SEO Link Building

There are many aspects involved in getting ranked highly on Yahoo, Google and Bing. In this article, we take a look at SEO link building, one of the major factors involved.

Link Building

What is a link? Well, technically it is a piece of code that acts to direct a visitor from one location to another. A more practical answer would be it is a vote of importance and relevance. Huh? Well, let’s assume I write a scathing article about how a certain politician is cheating on his spouse. Thousands of sites start linking to it as they refer their visitors to the story.

What happens? My site is going to shoot up in the rankings for the name of the politician. Why is this? The thousands of links pointing to the site tell the search engines that the page in question is really important to visitors and thus it should be given extra weight in the rankings.

Value of Links

Now, it should also be readily apparent that not all links are of equal value when doing SEO link building. Let’s take our example above. You decide to link to the article from your personal blog, which has roughly 50 visitors a month. Thanks! At the same time, the New York Times also links to the article. The New York Times has millions of visitors a month. Given this, the search engines are going to value the link from the Times much more than the one from your blog. Sorry about that. This is why the quality of the links being obtained is something that must be taken into account.

Natural Linking Patterns

A third key aspect of link building is the natural look. No, I am not talking about a rant against plastic surgery. With links, search engines look for a growth in links that is natural. This essentially means that links should be generated that point to all pages of the site, not just the home page. It also means that the text used in the referring links should vary and not always be the exact keyword phrase you want to rank for. If the links don’t look natural, you run the risk of seeing your rankings go nowhere.

SEO Link Building

SEO link building can be a frustrating concept for clients to deal with because it requires a lot of patience. If links are built in waves where there is a sudden burst of new links to a site then none and then another sudden burst, the search engines will downgrade the site. It is far more important to go at a steady pace with link building, making sure to add quality links as much as possible. To this end, it is also critical that links be built to both the home page and the internal pages of the site because that is what would happen naturally if you were willing to wait 10 years.

At the end of the day, SEO link building is easily one of the most important factors in getting your site ranked highly in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do to generate high quality links in a natural pattern for your site.

<< SEO Marketing