What is link building?
Link-building is the practice of obtaining links from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals (people clicking on the links) and search engine ranking. In theory, if two pages are equally relevant to a search term, the page with the better inbound link profile will rank higher than the other page in search results.
Like in everything else in life, the world does not reward those who sit back and wait for links to come to them. It is incumbent on website owners to go out and tell the world about their site and get people to link to it. Companies who do not pursue link building are likely to lose their search engine traffic, or never even receive traffic to sustain their business to begin with.
Why does link building improve my placement in the search rankings?
For almost all popular search terms or keywords there are hundreds or potentially thousands of relevant and competing websites. Search engines need a method to help them determine which websites are an authority in their area. By examining your “link profile” or how many and what type of sites link to your site they are able to do this. The idea of using links to measuring a site’s importance was first made popular by Google, with the implementation of their PageRank algorithm. In simple terms, each link to a web page is a vote for that page.
Not all links are equal.
When Google introduced the idea of PageRank they borrowed the idea from academia, where a publish authors work could be measured by the number of other experts site their work. This worked great for academia but because of the commercial nature of the Internet this system left the opportunity for manipulation. As a result the algorythim has become greatly more complex, and many other factors are now considered when the search engines analyze your link profile.
Two major factors in link analysis by the search engines are Relevance and Authority.
Relevance. If the link comes from a site that is on the same topic as the publisher’s site (or a closely related topic), that link is worth more than a links that comes from a site with an unrelated topic
Authority. It is generally accepted that search engines attempt to measure how much they trust a site. If a site is highly trusted, its vote will count for more than if it is not that trusted.
Generally speaking link building is the life blood of any successful search marketing campaign.
