Link Building for SEO
As search engines crawl or “spider” the web, links are the bridges between all pages and websites. Using highly sophisticated link analysis, search engines work out how pages are related to each other and in what ways. The number and kinds of links on your website can contribute to your website’s health (or otherwise).
All search engines use links to try and work out how trustworthy a site is. A website that has a lot of links from good, trustworthy sources (not spam) will do better in the search rankings generally than websites that are stuffed full of useless links that are of no help to the person reading the page.
Link building is therefore quite complex – it is not the free for all that it used to be in the early days of search engines when people could just stuff web pages with links from anywhere. Search engines are now very sophisticated and they will use links (both internal, linking to a page within your site or external, linking from another site) to work out how trustworthy your site is and how much authority the information on it should have. This then affects where your site will rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS pages) for various phrases.
Since the late 90’s all search engines have used links as votes – representing the democracy of the web’s opinion about which web pages are important and popular. The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and complex algorithms create nuance evaluations of sites and pages based on this information.
Links aren’t the only ingredient in SEO, but they do attribute a large portion of the engines’ algorithms to link-based factors. Through links, engines can not only analyze the popularity of a website and a page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sites.
Google and other search engines want to make sure they only serve up companies that are good to deal with, deliver products or service on time and that people can trust. They get this information from the information on your site and the quality of links you have.
This information will come from many places and one of the main ranking weights will also be trusted good one-way inbound links. Great quality links can’t be bought; they have to be earned through a comprehensive link building strategy both with the content on your site (and the internal links that we create when we build a site and work with you on your content) and externally, which can be time-consuming and complex, but will really help your SEO.
Ensuring that you have a tight site structure with well-organised links and categories, that old links are regularly cleared out and that you have some good links to other trusted sites around the web will help your domain authority and thus your Google Search Rankings.
Link building has always been important and as the web gets more competitive it’s worth investing in a smart link building strategy. Contact us today and discuss how we can work with you to ensure you are a trusted site.