What is link building and why is it important? Whether you are new to building a link or have been working for a while, we are sure that you will find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link building is always changing and the importance of building high-quality links has never been greater. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you want to compete and thrive online, and that will not change quickly. This guide is designed to guide you quickly and in the right direction. There is much to do, but we have split everything into easy-to-process chapters and have added many examples along the way. We hope you enjoy the Link Building beginner's guide!
What is link building and why is it important?
Whether you are new to building a link or have been working for a while, we are sure that you will find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link building has always been changing and the importance of building high-quality links has never been greater. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you want to compete and thrive online, and that will not change quickly. This guide is designed to guide you quickly and in the right direction. There is much to do, but we have split everything into easy-to-process chapters and have added many examples along the way. We hope you enjoy the Link Building beginner's guide!
Definition of link building
Link building is the process of getting hyperlinks from other websites to yours. A hyperlink (usually only referred to as a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to search the web; they crawl the links between the individual pages on your website and they crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for creating links, and although they vary in degrees of difficulty, SEOs generally agree that link building is one of the most difficult parts of their work. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do well. For that reason, if you have mastered the art of building high-quality links, it can really give you a head start on both other SEOs and your competition.
Why is link building important for SEO?
The anatomy of a hyperlink. To understand the importance of link building, it is important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how search engines see links and what they can interpret from them.
There are two basic ways in which search engines use links:
To discover new web pages
To determine how well a page should be ranked in the results Once search engines have searched pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add them to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they think a page is of sufficient quality to rank well for relevant keywords (Google has made a short video to explain that process). When they decide this, the search engines not only look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. In general, the more high-quality websites are linked to you, the greater the chance that you will get a good position in the search results.
Links as a ranking factor led Google to dominate the search engine in the late 1990s. One of the founders of Google, Larry Page, invented the PageRank, which Google always used to measure the quality of a page, based in part on the number of links that refer to it. This measured value was then used as part of the overall ranking "target =" _ blank "> ranking algorithm and became a strong signal because it was a very good way to determine the quality of a page.
It was so effective because it was based on the idea that a link can be seen as a trust vote of a page, meaning that no links are found if it wasn't. The theory is that when someone links to another website, they effectively say it's a good resource. Otherwise they would not refer to it, just as you would not send a friend to a bad restaurant.
However, SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate PageRank and search results for chosen keywords. Google has been actively looking for ways to find websites that manipulated search results, and has started rolling out updates specifically aimed at filtering websites that could not be ranked.
This has also led Google to start abolishing a number of links-making techniques that were previously considered fine, for example by submitting your website to web folders and getting a link for it. This was a technique that Google recommended at a certain point in time, but it was abused and frequently used by SEOs, so Google stopped giving equal value to that type of links.
More recently, Google has actively penalized the rankings of websites that have attempted to penalize this excessive use of these techniques - often referred to as over-optimization - in their link building. The regular Penguin updates from Google are such an example. Knowing which link building techniques to avoid and stay within the Google guidelines is an important topic that we will discuss later in this guide.
We do not know the full algorithm that Google uses to determine the search results, that is the secret sauce of the company. Despite that fact, the general consensus among the SEO community (according to the 2015 Moz search ranking factors survey) is that links still play a major role in that algorithm. They represent the largest two segments of the pie chart below.