The Importance of Link Building to Your SEO Campaign

The Importance of Link Building to your SEO Campaign

When people think about search engine optimisation they tend to think about keywords, keyword phrases and other such techniques. Keywords however are a secondary form of SEO and while they can make a significant difference to your search engine rankings they have to be used alongside other techniques for them to be effective. One such technique is link building whereby other websites, and hopefully those who already have high search engine rankings, choose to link their site to yours.

By doing this, the linking websites help to increase your link popularity. This is a measure of your website’s importance and it is seen by many of the big search engines. Thus, the more links you have to your website, the higher your link popularity and the higher ranking you achieve. Websites with high rankings generally tend to get more traffic and as this is ultimately what you’re aiming for then effective link building is a must.

Link popularity is used by search engines to give your website a page rank. The page rank scale runs from zero to ten with the highly popular sites having a ranking of nine or ten. It is these sites if possible that you want to have linked to your site as they boost your link popularity and therefore your page rank enormously. Most sites have a page rank of one or two because they don’t have the links that they need to generate a good ranking. Many people make the mistake of thinking that the more links they have going to their site, the better their page rank will be however it is more a question of quality than quantity when it comes to link building for SEO.

So for example, having hundreds of low ranking sites linking to your site will help to increase your link popularity and your page rank eventually however having just a handful of the top ranking sites making links to your site will increase your ranking much more quickly. This is because search engines look to see which sites have created a link to your site and if the big sites are linking then they assume that your site must be of importance. It also helps if the linking sites are centred on the same broad theme as your own so there is a common thread for the search engines to follow. For example, if you have a website explaining how to self-publish a book then links from large publishers or well established self publishers with high page rankings would be ideal.

Of course it isn’t easy to get high ranking super-websites to link to your unknown site over night and the process of link building is very time consuming. There are a number of ways to generate links to your site however and even though they can take a while to work through, they should be done as they are essential to your site’s SEO. The best and easiest way to encourage good quality links from top websites is to have interesting and informative content on your site that is going to help drive traffic to their site. As mentioned earlier, if you have a site that explains the process of writing and self publishing your own book and the content is quality advice then this will naturally attract the attention of self publishers, some of which will have the link popularity and high page rank that you’re looking for. Other links may come from small publishers and if you get the content exactly right then major publishing houses may also ask to create a link.

There are other ways to get your site noticed however including article directories, industry forums and through directory submissions. It is important that you use targeted keywords within your links when using these processes though as the search engines need something to relate to your website. Link building is a long process and the desired outcome won’t appear overnight however if you put the time and energy into creating quality links then that is 95% of your SEO campaign complete.

This article was submitted by Paul Leach of PGL Internet Services, a Sydney based Search Engine Optimisation company.