What is Link Building?

By Web Heads - March 12, 2010

Link building is an extension of your search engine optimization (SEO) effort and has become the most important tool for your business to get high ranking placement on the search engines for your keywords. If you don't know what the keywords for your business are then we suggest you purchase some Keyword Research from Web Heads to solidify your SEO strategy.

Typically at the end of the web design process we will optimize the site for the search engines by first doing keyword research to isolate which keywords are relevant to the business and then figure out if they have search volume (no sense optimizing for keywords that no one is searching for!). We then use those keywords for certain aspects of the site that the search engine spiders like. Now that the site has been optimized for the newly acquired keywords we can use that data for our link building campaign.

Link building or link backs or backlinks are essentially getting quality websites to link back to your site using your keywords. For example - If you own a day care in Windsor Ontario and want to get better placement when someone searches "Day Care Windsor", you will have to acquire quality link backs that utilize that keyword phrase. Now what do we mean by that? A website page needs to link to your site like this - Day Care Windsor - you see how this is highlighted as a link? Search engines like Google and Yahoo consider this as a vote towards the quality of your content. The more votes you have for what your site is about the closer you get to the top of the search results for that phrase. Google needs it to be this way or it would be difficult to figure out who has quality content on the web. So just create a hundred websites with this link back on all of them right? Wrong! You have to get quality sites to link back to you because of Page Rank. Now what the heck is that?

Page Rank is the ranking that Google gives to pages of website that are of value. For example - Google's homepage (www.google.com) has a Page Rank of 10 (10 is the highest). So maybe you write an article that is of great importance to your industry and lots of other websites link to it as the bible of your topic which allows Google to give that page really good page rank. These are the pages we are looking for and there are several tools to check the page rank of a page (www.prchecker.info).

So really what we are trying to do with link building is to get highly page ranked pages to link to your site using your keywords so that they can pass on some of that link juice to you and therefore increase your page rank (Which in turn makes your page more important and boosts you up in the search results). So lets put it this way, in the paragraph above we were trying to get better placement for the keywords "Day Care Windsor". Now think if the homepage of Google had a link on it using that keyword. You would instantly be jumped to the #1 search result for that keyword. The link juice that page provides is that powerful. Getting a thousand pages with a page rank of 1 to link to you is good, but getting 50 sites with a page rank of 5 is better. See what I mean?

In our next article we will explore how you can get these quality link backs and where to find the best places that give link backs. Don't forget Web Heads has several link building services and packages that you can choose from to kick off your link building strategy today.

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