What is Link Building?
Link building is an important part of any SEO strategy. It helps to generate and drive organic traffic to your website via search engine results pages (SERPs). Link building, combined with expertly executed SEO strategies, such as the ones devised by Andy Morley, makes for excellent, impressive results with regards to leads and conversion rates. But what does it mean to ‘link build’, why is it important in the SERPs and how can it benefit your business?
What does it mean to ‘link build’?
Link building refers to the acquisition of hyperlinks from other websites. Hyperlinks, also known simply as just ‘links’, enable internet users to navigate their way, easily, from one page to another over online. Search engines, in turn, use links to crawl the web in order to establish which websites are trustworthy and which aren’t.
It also delves further than that. Search engines can crawl each and every page you have on your website as well as the links that go from website to website. With this in mind, you should be striving to ‘link build’ for the long term. It also gives you the opportunity to leverage a variety of link building techniques and strategies that enables you to:
- Build authority
- Increase chances of ranking well in the SERPs
- Generate organic searches and, as a result, traffic
Why is link building important for search engines?
- To reveal new website pages that can then be ranked in the SERPs
- To determine how well a website page, or an entire website, should rank in the SERPs
As soon as the search engines have crawled those website pages, content will be extracted and added to their indexes. From here, it can then be determined whether or not a page is sufficient enough, in terms of quality, to be ranked highly in the SERPs when looking at keywords and key phrases.
Search engines also look at the number of links that go to another page from an external site as well as the content on the page. The quality of the external website is also assessed and ranked accordingly in the SERPs.
Essentially, link building allows the search engines to only present good quality, relevant websites that will leave the user feeling satisfied that they’ve found exactly what they have been looking for. This then means that more people will come back and use the search engine again as they were impressed with the results it brought up initially.
How can link building benefit your business?
- It can build a relationship between yourself and your customers – it can build long term relationships with key influencers within the industry. But then again, relationships between yourself, your customers and influencers is extremely valuable, so as long as meaningful relationships are built, so is trust
- It helps to send referral traffic to your site – a good quality link can lead to an increase in relevant traffic. Relevant traffic helps to increase both leads and, subsequently, sales
- It aids in building a company brand and reputation – link building helps to establish your website as an authority in your niche, which means you’ll be placed higher up in the SERPs. Ranking higher in the search engines is beneficial for your business as your website is likely to be seen before your competitors’ site
