After working on your first website for a while and realizing that visitors don’t magically come to your virtual door, you start to learn a little about generating traffic. One of the first things you’ll probably come across is link building. Let’s take a look at what link building is and how it can help you in your online business.
What is a link?
A link is a connector between two web pages. You can connect an article on your website to a category or landing page, or even to another article on the same site. Those are considered internal links as they connect one part of your website to another.
Then there are the external links that connect one page of one website to another. For example, when I write an article and post it to an article directory, I connect my article page in the directory to a page on my own website through the link.
What is link building?
Link building is the process of actively going out and building more links, creating more connections, which lead to pages on your own website. This can be achieved by writing and submitting articles like the one you are reading right now. Another good example of link building is writing guest blog posts that include a link or two to the writer’s website.
Other forms of link building include directory submissions, blog comments, forum participation, setting up multiple profile pages, social bookmarking, press release submissions, and the like. Entire courses are being taught and books have been written on the art of link building.
Why is link building important for SEO?
Why is link building so important and why do many of us spend hours and hours of our week on this task? On the one hand, because it creates those connections or highways between the pages and the sites that, of course, send some visitors to us.
However, the most compelling reason to build links is to rank well in search engines and therefore get tons of free traffic to our sites. Here’s why link building is important for SEO (search engine optimization).
A link’s anchor text (those are the words you’re using to underline blue and create a clickable link) is the second most important factor when it comes to ranking a page in search engines. The first is the title tag. Combined, the title tag and backlinks make up at least 80% of the ranking factors. By simply making sure you use the right title and then working on building backlinks with keyword-rich anchor text, you can get a page one from Google for just about any term. You can grab quite a few backlinks if you’re targeting a competitive keyword, but you can do it just by doing those two things.
Give it a try. Find a long-tail keyword and write a short blog post or article about it. Make sure to include your keyword in the title tag (as soon as possible in the tag) and then create a few links to that page with your keyword in the anchor text. For most long-tail keywords, 2-3 good links is all you need to rank on the first page of search engines.