Why Link Building is Important for Your Business
The process of link building is a vital component of a successful and complete SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) marketing plan. If you are not aware of the link building technique, or what it can do for your business, you could be losing out on business that your competitors are picking up. Successful online businesses know, link building strategies play a key role in their success, helping their businesses grow through high-quality SEO marketing campaigns.
If you are looking to achieve the same results for your business online, getting to understand what link building is and how it works, is your first step on the road to greater successes and bigger shares of the market place that you are competing for.
Link Building 101 – Understanding What Link Building Is
While it may sound complex and somewhat confusing, link building is actually very straightforward. Once you understand what link building is, you’ll be able to easily implement effective link building strategies within your SEO marketing campaigns.
Essentially, link building is a strategy whereby different web pages as well as different websites, are linked together in order to drive traffic from one to the other. By grabbing hyperlinks from various websites and adding them to your own page, you create a network of links that help search engines crawl pages by relevance when ranking in their search engine.
Anatomy of Links and How to Create Them
At the core of the link building technique, is the link itself. Therefore, understanding the anatomy of a link may help you to understand how they are created in the first place. Every link is composed of four different parts and each plays a key role in how the link performs:
- The Anchor: This is the beginning part of the link and its job is to open the link tag and signal the search engine that it contains a link to another destination. The anchor is identified by the letter “a”.
- Link Referral Location: This part of the link anatomy is used to indicate the URL that the link anchor is pointing to. The Link Referral Location can consist of a number of different items, including an image, a web page or even a downloadable file. The Link Referral Location is marked with the letters “href”. However, this can also be preceded by a hashtag (#), which is used to indicate a link to a different segment within the same page.
- Visible Link Text: This part of the link is the part which the user sees on the webpage. It is the part that the user will click on in order to go to the page that it is linked to. The Visible Link Text always stands out from the rest of the text on the webpage, alerting the reader that they can click through to another page, and is usually underlined and written in blue.
- Link Closure: This is the part of the link that tells the search engine that the link is complete.
Why Link Building is Important for Your Business
We’ve already highlighted the benefits of link building as it relates to SEO rankings and marketing strategies. However, the following should also go some way in helping you to understand the importance of link building in modern business.
Link Building is Great for Building Your Brand
Using link building can be a great way to build up your brand with those searching for the products or services in which you deal. By linking to relevant, high-value content, you can show visitors that you are an authority or expert in your particular field. This also creates trust for your brand, and users are more likely to go with the services or products that you offer.
Link Building for Building Relationships
The very nature of link building necessitates communication between different business websites since you are requesting that another site includes a link to your site. You can then reciprocate by including links to their sites. This is a great way to build long term relationships within an industry or within a certain niche that includes various aspects, products or services.