What is link building?
Link building, as the name suggests, is the process of generating backlinks to your website to improve your search rankings.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What are some link building techniques I can use?
Examples of link building techniques you can use include:
- Publishing shareworthy content—and by ‘shareworthy’, we mean something thought-provoking, novel, or controversial. The goal is to get people talking because when they do, they share your content with other people, and each share generates one additional backlink for you.
- Inviting contributors. Another easy way to generate backlinks is to get other people—preferably experts in your field—to contribute to your blog because they would naturally want to share the finished piece with their family, friends, and followers, generating more backlinks for you in the process.
- Publishing useful content. The third link building technique you can try is to simply publish content that helps people accomplish things and solve problems because useful content tends to get a lot of shares.
Question #2: What is the purpose of link building?
The primary purpose of link building is to improve your search ranking.
Back in the day, the best way for a search engine (such as Yahoo or Google) to find the most relevant content for users was to just check for the most used keywords. The more a web page or piece of content used a particular set of keywords, the higher they ranked for those keywords.
Over time, however, this approach proved to be extremely prone to abuse, so Google started to also take into account other factors to determine just how relevant a web page or piece of content is to a user—and one such factor is the number of quality backlinks it has.
Simply put, the more people there are linking to your content, the more credible and relevant it appears to Google, which, in turn, helps improve its ranking in search.
Question#3: Is link building still important today?
Yes, link building is still important today. However, take note that it is just one of the many factors that search engines take into account, so it should not be the sole focus of your SEO efforts.
Question #4: Can I just buy backlinks instead of going through the trouble of organic link building?
Technically, yes, you can just buy backlinks instead of going through the trouble of organic link building. However, this practice goes against the policies of search engines such as Google. If you get caught—and there is a big chance that you will—you will be penalized, which could cause you to rank even lower or be completely omitted from search engine results pages (SERPs).
Question #5: What are the benefits of it?
The main benefits of link building include:
- Better search rankings. As we have seen earlier, the more quality backlinks your website has, the better its odds of ranking high in search.
- Better brand image. The more people link to your content, the more you appear as an authority in your field, which, in turn, can cause even more people to link to your content.
- Increased website traffic. Of course, the more backlinks your content has, the more traffic it gets due to the increased reach and visibility.
Question #6: How many backlinks should I have?
The question is not how many backlinks you should have, but how many quality backlinks. You see, for Google (and other search engines) to actually recognise your content as a relevant, useful resource, your backlinks—at least most of them—should come from quality sources.
For example, let us say you run a camera store and you just published a piece on how to choose the best action camera. A backlink from a low-authority website or a random comment in an online forum would have significantly less impact on your search rankings than one from a high-authority website or blog that also specializes in camera-related content.