What is Link Building? Why it Matters?

What is link building and why is it important for a website?

Links and more commonly known as backlinks to all SEO marketers are the soul of the Internet when it comes to forming a successful digital campaign. If there is a way for websites to interact with each other and gain benefits out of these transactions it is through backlinks and their version of monetary gain is earning link juice or website authority. Like the real world, the more juice or authority you have, the richer you get.

Lets go a little deeper as to the relevance of authority. As everybody knows, Search Engines are the moderators of the Internet. The search engine spider crawls the Internet finding billions of new pages, indexes them and then matches each web page to the relevant search query. But that’s not all; the Search Engine has to maintain a level of quality with the page results it gives to users. To do this, they first need to be able to judge a site’s authority, which in a broader sense of the word would mean its credibility. One of the major factors Search Engines use to determine the credibility of a website is through its linking structure and a website that has no inbound or outbound links on its webpage will be considered of having no relevance by the search engine spider.

When a search engine spider crawls your website it cannot rate its design nor measure the level of your customer support or the services you offer. It can only read and grade the content on your website and the way you have managed your backlinks. Hence, there is a huge emphasis on the quality of the content on your site and the backlink structure you have adopted and exactly why link building is so important.

However, not all links are equally beneficial. Every link that you gain from various blogs, directories and other websites, will depend of a few things before being considered beneficial such as Page Rank, Alexa etc. The relevance of the link and the strength of the website from where you are receiving the link will determine how much authority you gain. Therefore, quantity obviously matters but more important the quality and diversity of the link will be more fruitful in the long run.

The ultimate goal of any marketer is to create a diverse range of high quality backlinks from various credible sources. But not all marketers tend to achieve this pinnacle. It takes time and patience and a lot of strategizing and in the end it is never that straight forward and many marketers in the process tend to compromise on the quality of such links and end up deterring their own websites with toxic links.

All successful marketers would give the same advice. Create good content and in time the links will follow. When a website focuses on content, website owners and general users tend to talk about it and share it with others. This is a very naturalistic way of doing link building but still does not provide any guarantees. However, from a search engine standpoint, the ethical way of link building has always been more rewarding.