A Beginner’s Guide to Link Building

In our previous blog about the inner workings of search engines, we mentioned how the quality of a page is taken into account when it comes to its ranking on the search engine results pages. But how does a search engine evaluate a page’s quality? Our Naples, FL SEO experts are here to explain why it’s all a matter of links…

What is link building?

Link building is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy to increase a website’s visibility in searches through the acquisition of backlinks from other websites. The quantity, and particularly the quality of these links leading to the website, is a vital component of that page’s overall search engine ranking. The process of generating these beneficial hyperlinks is called link building.

What defines a link’s quality?

Link building is not just a matter of getting as many links back to your site as possible. Quality matters too. In fact, a large number of links from low-quality websites could actually be detrimental to your rankings. If there are a number of links to your website coming from reputable, ‘trusted’ pages, such as the website of a respected publication, this will positively affect your website’s ranking – as well as making it easy for people who are likely interested in the services you have to offer to land on your page.

To put it simply, the search engine will likely find your page to be trustworthy if it can see that lots of other pages it trusts are linking back to you. However, if numerous backlinks to your website come from untrustworthy pages – for example, a spam website – this will not work, and may actually negatively affect your rank.

Link building: how do you do it?

It takes work, but there are several ways to obtain backlinks from reputable websites. First of all, you need to have good content which is worth sharing. Repetitive, shoddily put-together, outdated content that adds nothing to what you can already find online is unlikely to be linked on reputable pages.

Once you create good content, you need to make sure the right people know about it – so if there is a website you feel could link to your page, do hit that “contact” button! A little self-promotion never hurts, and if your content is good there is no reason why you shouldn’t feel confident reaching out to make it known.

Remember, attempts at ‘cheating’ your way to the first page of search engine results by having backlinks on spam pages will simply not work. Good links have to be earned; they cannot be bought.

Link building can be a lot of work and it requires a clear strategy, good content, lots of outreach and patience. If you’d like help to grow your inbound links, our Naples, FL SEO team can help. Get in touch to find out more.

#SEO #SearchEngineOptimization #LinkBuilding