Why is Building Links Important for SEO?

30 Nov 2007 at 15:03 by Joshua J. Steimle

Incoming links, also call backlinks, inbound links, or “links from other sites”, are one of the primary means by which Google (and many other search engines) ranks websites. There are four ways in which incoming links can affect your website. If you're not interested in why linkbuilding is important but rather how to build links then take a gander here.

1. Link Quantity. First of all, Google assumes the more incoming links a website has, the more important it is and therefore it should get ranked higher.

2. Link Quality. Second, if Google thinks Website A is important or of high quality and gives it good rankings and Website A links to Website B, then Google also assumes Website B is important. This idea is often referred to by the informal term “link juice.” The more juice a site has, the more it can pass on to other sites it links to.

3. Site Relevance. Third, if Website A which has a lot of content about Topic A, and Website A links to Website B, then Google will assume that Website B also has something to do with Topic A.

4. Link Relevance. Fourth, the text of the incoming link matters. In the case of your site, you want incoming links that include the keywords you’re optimizing for. That being the case, the more incoming links you can build, the text of which includes your keywords, the better. This is because when Google follows a link from Website A to Website B, it reads the text of the link on Website A and assumes, quite logically, that Website B has something to do with the text contained in the link on Website A, and therefore Website B is going to be ranked higher for a certain keyword if it has lots of incoming links that contain that keyword.

Unfortunately, but logically, most of your incoming linktext is going to be either the name of your company, or a url. These are not bad links, they’re simply links that aren’t living up to their full potential.

To sum up, the ideal incoming link comes from a high-ranking website related by topic to your website (i.e. the other website already ranks for the keyword(s) you want to rank for), and the text of the link from the other website to yours would contain the keywords you want to rank for.

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Comments

I'm impressed that you have time for all this writing. How about some time for Dad's website?

Posted by: Dad at December 2, 2007 09:12 PM

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