What is link building and why is it important

Links are a way for search engines to discover new pages and determine what should rank on their indexes and how well they should rank.

What do search engines use links for?

To discover new web pages

You must have heard of the term crawlers. Search engines employ bots or crawlers to discover new links that they can add to their ever growing list of pages.

The second thing search engines need links for is to determine how well a certain page should rank. Higher the authority of the page, as derived from the number of links and the quality of links to it, the better its odds of ranking well.

Crawling is important for search engines because once that task is over they can add new pages to their index.

Once they have a sufficiently big index it becomes easy to determine if the said page should be ranked for the keywords in its title.

We don’t know the entire process but we have some hints. The quality and the number of links matter. In a nutshell, I could say that the higher the number of high quality links pointing to your site the better the odds of your site ranking well.

Earlier Google used the patented formula of PageRank that Google used to determine the quality of a page. This metric used to be very popular to determine the strength of links and its importance in the ranking algo.

A link is generally seen as a vote to the page. And undeserving pages don’t really get those votes. The basic concept used to be that if another site links to a page, that particular site is effectively saying that the page it's linking out to is good.

This means you need quality content. David from Beomniscient says that, you can’t get quality content for cheap. So be prepared to pay topline editors and writers.

They have my confidence.

Because of the manipulations around page rank where sheer numbers mattered instead of link quality Google started discounting a large number of links from low quality directories, comment links and other such low quality places. Forum profile spam and other links are generally given zero weightage today.

Google is also actively penalizing sites that manage to bump up their rankings from such spammy attempts.

The lesson? Never resort to spam to build up your link profile. Instead use high quality links.

It’s important that recognize and learn to differentiate good links from bad.

Links are the most important factors that influence rankings.

What are high quality links?

Quality links according to Google only have a single definition. These are links you acquired naturally and didn’t automate, or buy them.

Links that you earn on your own are by definition quality links.

There are different ways to earn quality links chief of which are outreach and posting data rich content.

If your content is good, you naturally start attracting links to the said content. Build relationships with influencers and they will help you acquire links because once you know few influencers outreach becomes easy. Also shady link practices hurt your reputation.

The best strategy

So what’s the best strategy to get links?

Manually outreaching to bloggers or journalists via email is one of the best ways to get links. This way you’re ensuring that you’re building an active relationship with people. That helps you in the long term.

Always a/b test your emails before sending them.

Manual outreach gets you editorial links which are the best types of links to get.

Use a quality email marketing automation tool for this.

If you create good resources, getting links isn’t a problem. Here's an example from GetVoip.

Which kind of links to avoid?

You should avoid paid links at all costs. Paid links can get your site penalized. They run a heavy risk.

The way paid links works is you get in touch with a site and the site owner demands payment to post your link.

This goes explicitly against Google’s guidelines and leaves a pattern that’s easy to spot and penalize you for.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal should be to always acquire quality links to your site.