What Does Link Building Mean?

What Does Link Building Mean?

Link building is a process where you acquire backlinks, also known as hyperlinks, from other websites that are relevant to your website. Links are used to help users navigate their way across numerous websites on the internet to find the information that they are searching for. At the same time, search engines use links to find and crawl website pages, enabling the algorithm to identify new pages and index them accordingly. Search engines also use the internal links between your website pages to find your pages and index them.

Link Building and SEO

Acquiring links naturally from another website thanks to your high quality, unique, and informative content, is what SEO is all about. Natural acquisition of links is the best way to push your business to the top of search results, showing you as credible and an authoritative in your industry. This improves your reputation both with visitors and search engines.

Most digital marketing professionals will use a content based approach when it comes to link bundling strategies. These can be large campaigns to on-page copy, and press releases to infographs. Guides and tutorials, along with studies and reports, are great ways to secure natural links.

What Makes a Hyperlink?

How do search engines see links? How do they interpret them? Each part of the hyperlinks is broken down and labelled. It is broken down as follows:

• Anchor tag – this is the start of the link tag, “a.” This opens the link tag, telling search engines that the link is showing them other information
• Hyperlink referral – this is the “href,” that includes the URL that the link is pointing to. Note this does not have to be a web page, it can be a video, image, or a file available for download. 
• Anchor Text – this is what users see when they hover their mouse over the hyperlink. It shows them basic information on what the page is about that they are being directed to. 

How Search Engines See Links

Search engines use links to discover new web pages and determine the ranking of the web page. Search engines use algorithms, where bots crawl the pages on the internet. These bots extract the content of the pages and index them in a data base. This enables it to determine if the page has enough quality to be ranked for the relevant keywords. The search engine doesn't only take the page content into consideration, it also uses how many links point to your web pages from other websites. It also takes the quality of the referring website into consideration. The more high quality websites that link to you, the higher your ranking will be in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Conclusion

Link building in the digital marketing world means helping with navigation within your website and directing users and search engines to your website. Link building helps you improve user experience and drive organic traffic to your website by making search engines aware of your web pages and credibility of your brand.