In today’s digital age, one of the most important ways to ensure the success of your business is by maximizing your web presence. And, one of the most effective ways to do that is by optimizing your website (also known as SEO). Properly optimizing your website is one of the most important factors that play into how often and how high your website appears in search engine results for keywords related to your business. This in turn affects the number of people that have the opportunity to see and, ultimately, conduct business with your company online.
SEO isn’t rocket science, but it is a complex science with dozens of factors that are taken into account when calculating your website rankings including use of keywords, the quality of traffic that visits your page, and use of Google-brand social media tools (and much, much more). One of the most important ingredients to optimizing your website includes link building. Your back-link profile is scrutinized by Google to determine how relevant and authoritative your website and/or web pages are for the end user’s search. Link building is the act of creating a number of links back to your website on many external websites across the web, so that you receive traffic from a variety of different places on the Internet. Building links can be both a time-consuming and difficult process, and the work you put in to it does not always guarantee what results you’ll get out. So is link building really worth it?
The ultimate answer, due to the way that SEO works today is, YES. Taking time to properly build links to your page is a necessary and essential step to boosting your SEO ranking. Most simply, Google’s (and other search engines) algorithm for calculating SEO measures both a pages popularity and credibility. Google’s current SEO algorithm incorporates PageRank and “authority” to help determine a pages quality and importance. PageRank considers links to your site on the Internet to be like votes so, the more “votes” there are for your site on the Internet, the more popular it is and, thus, the higher it deserves to show up in search engine rankings. But it’s not as simple as it sounds, since not all links are created equal in the eyes of Google. PageRank also has the ability to determine the credibility of a website, and it gives more weight to links that are included on high-quality and credible sites. Google also recently updated their Penguin algorithm recently to Penguin version 2.1, which was created to helped battle and eliminate link spam on the Internet. Penguin 2.1 attempts to discredit businesses that simply flood the Internet with links to their website to cheat the system.
Ultimately, link building is an effort that requires time, energy, and knowledge. And, if done properly, can be incredibly beneficial to any business that takes it seriously and executes it correctly. Build relationships with other businesses who will link to your site and stock your website full of high-quality content. Within due time, you will see your website pages climb to the top of the search engine results pages!
