Why Is Link Building Important
Link Building and SEO are constantly changing, what was useful and recommended for SEO a couple of years ago, can be obsolete at this point. For instance, right now it’s very important to go beyond link building, and start linking with high-quality sites, authorities in the industry.
For that reason, implementing link building campaigns focused on high-quality sites is vital to enhance your SEO efforts and to keep a strong online presence. Those are the new rules and if a website wishes to stay relevant and competitive, it must comply with them.
Why Is Link Building Important For SEO
In order to understand the complexity that lies within high-quality link building, we must go back to link building basics. It’s important to understand how links are created, how Google sees links and what is Google looking to find in them, it’s important to study the complete anatomy of a Hyperlink (they’re also referred to as links)
The Link Tag: At the beginning of a link, you’ll always see the letter “a”. The link tag is also called the anchor tag. The start of a link tag is visible to Google’s crawlers and lets them know that a link that connects to another site is on the way.
LRL (Link Referral Location): After the initial “a”, comes the letters “href” which means Hyperlink Referral. After that, you’ll see a quotation mark. This mark indicates that the following text will contain the URL to which the hyperlink is pointing.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t always refer to a website, it could be the location of a file or an image. Sometimes instead of a URL, you see something different that starts with a “#” sign at the beginning. Those will be local links that guide the user to another section of the page being displayed.
Anchor or Visible Text Of Link: This is the text of the link that is visible for users. This is where they click if they want to open such a link. This bit of text is usually arranged differently from the rest so it's clear that it’s clickable.
End Of Link Tag: It’s the final part of the link tag, and it tells the search engine that’s the end of the tag.
Why Are Links So Relevant To Web Search Engines
There are two main reasons why links play such an important role for search engines. First, they help web search engines to discover new websites. The other reason- and this is why it helps SEO so much- is because it helps web search engines figure out how high a website should rank in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).
As soon as the search engine crawls through all the websites on the internet, they are able to add website content to their indexes. By doing this, they have the ability to decide if a page should make it for the higher rankings or not.
During this decision-making time, search engines consider other factors than content and keywords. They also examine the number of links from external websites that are pointing to that website. If a page has many high-authority websites, the higher it will rank in SERPs.
In fact, links were the initial ranking factor that boosted Google’s popularity back in the nineties, that's how they started taking over the search engine market. One of Google’s founders invented something called PageRank which was a metric used by Google to know how many links were pointing at it.
Since it was a pretty accurate way to determine a website’s relevancy for a particular search, they kept including it in their overall ranking algorithm, it was a very strong signal.
The method became very popular and effective because it was reliable and trustworthy. It was designed based upon the idea that a link from another website could be seen as vouching between websites, meaning that a website was not going to receive any links unless it truly deserved them.
The way they see it was that if you linked your website with somebody else’s you were guaranteeing that the other website is a useful one. Like you wouldn’t recommend a website or something that is not useful.
Everything was working just fine until some SEO specialists found a way to use PageRank in their favour, by searching results for specific keywords. Google counterattacked by actively searching all the websites that were using search results fraudulently. They started implementing regular updates specially designed to dismiss all the websites that were not relevant enough to rank in search results.
Those practices have evolved into penalties and bans to websites incurring in those practices which can really hurt a website’s online positioning. For this reason, try to always do white-hat tactics on all of your SEO efforts.
If you’re not sure about how to start a good link building strategy without incurring in prohibited techniques, make sure that you have the right guidance to get your company’s website on top of web search results and following all of Google’s rules.