Link building is the most significant (and at the same time, most challenging), SEO requirement and skill. Basically, it is a mixture of various different skills: you need to be highly efficient in sales, content creation, psychology, programming, and of some good old marketing styles.
You need to master and incorporate all of these if you want a wide range of people to steadily link to your website. Simply put, if you want to generate more search engine traffic, then link building is a definite must. But first, what exactly is link building? How do you do it? And what are the benefits you can get from it?
What is link building?
Basically, link building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks from various other websites to your own. A hyperlink, commonly just referred to as a link, is a way for web users to navigate through the various pages within the Internet. Search engines typically utilize links to crawl the web. They will crawl the links between entire websites and even crawl the links between the individual pages within your own website.
What are the techniques to building links?
There are countless of ways to build links and they each vary in difficulty. In fact, majority of SEOs agree that link building is one of the most difficult parts of their jobs. In addition to that, due to its importance, SEOs do not treat it lightly and they spend a bulk of their time doing it well. For this reason, if you can truly master the art of high quality link building, then you can come out ahead of other SEOs and your other competition.
What is the importance of link building?
Here are 3 important reasons why:
- Link building can boost brand exposure.
- It is still one of the best ways to improve visibility in search engines.
- Links deliver positive signals to Google. This can help improve and develop a bad backlink profile.
Why is link building significant for an SEO?
In order to fully understand the importance of link building, it is important to understand the basics of how it is created in the first place. You should also understand how search engines see these links and what how they interpret them. Here is the basic anatomy of link building:
Beginning of link tag. This is called as an anchor tag. It is the opening of the link tag and it is the one that tells search engines that the link is about to lead into something else.
Location of link referral. The ‘href’ in the link stands for ‘hyperlink referral’. The text inside the quote marks also indicates the URL that the link is currently pointing to. However, this does not necessarily have to be a web page. It could also be a file to be downloaded or the specific address of a particular image. Also you might occasionally notice something other than a URL that begins with the # sign. This stands for the local links, which would take you into a different section of the page that you are already on.
Anchor/visible text of the link. This is the small bit of text that your website visitor will see on the page. Also, if they want to open the link, then this small bit of text is the one that they need to click. This text is typically formatted in such a way that makes it stand out from the rest of the text surrounding it. More often than not, it is underlined and is the color blue, indicating to users that it is a link and is clickable.
Closure of the link tag. This indicates to the search engines that the end of the link tag has been reached.
These are just some of the important facts about link building that you should know. Knowing exactly what it is, what its benefits are, and what its anatomy is can help you make it more effective which in turn can help boost your business.
