What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring links for a website from another website. There are a number of different methods and types of link.

When speaking to an SEO Consultant you may hear link building referred to as part of off-page SEO, which encompasses all aspects external to your own website as opposed to on-page SEO, which are factors that are on your own website.

What do links do?

On a basic level, a link acts as a 'vote' or 'endorsement' from one website to another in the eyes of Google. They are then used by Google as a ranking factor (along with 100s of other ranking factors, including on-page) for how high your website will appear in the search results.

The value of links

Links pass on 'authority' to a website if they are from a site that has 'authority' itself. However it is not only authority that is used to determine the value of a link – search engines also look at the relevance of the referring site.

A website can be very high in authority, but at the same time be completely irrelevant e.g. a football club's site linking to an SEO site is great from a link authority point of view, but as football has nothing to do with SEO and vice versa it will not have anywhere near the same effect as if it was a link from another SEO site of similar authority.

So in conclusion, the RELEVANCE and QUALITY of the links that come into a website are part of the criteria used to determine where a website will sit in the Google rankings.

I-COM is committed to providing sustainable SEO campaigns; we always strive to build quality links from relevant websites.

Reasons to build links

The biggest reason to build links is of course to attempt to rise up the Google Rankings and therefore generate more traffic and more sales/enquiries.

It is also important because your competitors will also be building links, and therefore will overtake you if you do not keep up.

To find out more about how linkbuilding can help your business, contact the I-COM online marketing team on 0161 402 3170, or e-mail us and we'll get back to you.