Understanding Link Building And Why You Need Links

If you are going to succeed with an online business or website, you need to have the right internet marketing strategy set up. This can include marketing tools such as SEO, PPC advertising, and even banner advertising. Perhaps one of the most respected and most successful methods of internet advertising, however, is link building.

Link building is ultimately like having other websites give you a good vote, because they put your link on their site. Let’s break it down, to make it easier for you to understand.

When you embark on the process of link building, your goal is to get your website’s URL on other websites. These links will basically show the search engine that someone else thinks you have credible information, because they are backing up your site with your link on their page. Ultimately, this is like getting votes for your site, because the more credible links you have, the higher your search engine ranking will be. Note the use of the word “credible.” You might have 80 sites out there with your link on them. Good for you; if only twenty or thirty of them are credible, strongly rated websites, those are the only ones that matter. What’s more, the ones on weaker sites can actually DECREASE your ranking.

Although it seems like a good idea to quantify your link building by getting as many links on as many sites as you can, this isn’t the key to successful link building. Proper linking focuses on quality rather than quantity, meaning that having links on 10 or 20 good sites is better than having your URL on 50 so-so websites. The quality of the “votes” you’re getting is far more important to the search engines than the number. Another element that plays a large role will be the position of your links on the page. For example, links near the top of the page rank better than links that are in the bottom part of the page or jumbled into a resource box in the footer.

Now that you understand why you need link building and what practices are best, you’re probably wondering how you get your links posted in the first place. That’s the part that can get tricky. Directory submissions and forum postings are easy, you just place your link and you’re done. Getting your link on sites in other ways takes time, though. You have to establish relationships and network with other websites to achieve this. If you prefer, you can hire a marketing team to do it for you.