Link Building is the process of getting hyperlinks from a different website to your own site. It’s also called backlinking.
Search engines use links from sites all over to crawl the web. The search engine crawlers look at the links on your site. They also look at the links between sites. It’s easy to understand that sites that have larger amounts of higher quality backlinks will rank higher for authority in the eyes of Google because more backlinks tell Google that you’re someone to watch.
To understand why link building is important for SEO, let’s look at the basics of a link.
The quality of a link is becoming more important today than ever. Google has begun penalizing websites that build low-quality or spam links.
Link building in the past was a free-for-all back in the dark ages of SEO. We used to try anything – directory listings, link farms, white hat, black hat – whatever it took to get our sites to rank.
Times have changed with the introduction of the Penguin updates (see A Complete Guide to the Google Penguin Algorithm Update located here These updates aggressively hurt websites that pursue low-quality link building techniques.
When thinking about starting a link building campaign, focus on building medium or high-quality links only. It will help you to avoid being penalized in the future.
