Summary: Google uses the links to your site as a way of telling what your site is about and whether it can be trusted. Links are like votes and sites with more votes from other trusted websites appear higher in Google’s search engine results.
Link building involves getting other websites to link to your website. Why would you want to do that? Because links to your site can help search engines figure out what your site is about, and whether it’s useful, trustworthy and relevant.
How do search engines use links to my site?
Whenever a user searches for a key word or phrase in a search engine, it displays a bunch of results that it ‘thinks’ are most relevant for that user. One of the ways it achieves this is by looking at the website’s ‘link profile’.
The link profile is the search engine’s analysis of all pages within its index that link to your website. Very generally, each link to your site counts as a vote for your site. Website pages with more votes will feature higher in the search engine results than website pages with less votes. It’s not so simple because not all links are equal – some count for more than others. It depends on the link relevance, authority and trust as well as the page rank of the site that’s linking to you.
Another crucial factor is the anchor text within the link. The anchor text is the word used for the link itself. Typically, this is often your website name, URL or some unhelpful phrase such as ‘click here’. Ideally, though, you’d like anchor text to be a key word or phrase that you’re targeting. If a relevant page links to you using relevant anchor text, this tells search engines that your page is likely to be about the subject of the link.
What happens if I don’t build links?
You can’t just wait for people to find your content and link to it – building links is an active process. You need to go out and tell the world about your site and content, and get people to link to it. If you don’t, you’re at high risk of your search engine traffic declining, and consequently, of not meeting the goals you’ve set for your website.
Building links also, naturally, helps search engines to find your content. So as you add more pages to your website, you can use a link building strategy to help get these new pages indexed faster.
Are there any rules as to where I get links?
Yes. You need to ensure you follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and therefore you should never buy links. Google doesn’t treat websites kindly who purchase links with a view to influencing their ranking in Google’s index. Buying links can be effective in the short term but extremely detrimental in the long term and Google is very good at detecting this practice. Look at ‘Should I buy links for SEO?’ for more info.
What’s the best way to get links?
A good link building strategy includes a multi pronged approach, making use of the many legitimate ways to get links.
These include:
- Asking for a link from a relevant site or page
- Giving away tools, templates and free stuff, and including a link back to your site
- Writing articles for article sites and including a link to your site
- Developing a widget that includes a link back to your site
- Using bookmarking, social news and social media sites to create links
- Using PR to generate links
This site includes guides to utilising these and other legitimate link building techniques that will help you gain traffic and trust in the eyes of the major search engines.
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