What is link building?

Link building is the necessary evil to qualify for good search engine rankings. A link is seen as a “vote” in Google’s eyes, and put simply, the more quality links you have from related websites, the more important Google will deem your site.

What is a link?

A link or hyperlink is a gateway or roads between two web pages. To best visualise this I ask you the question, have you ever clicked on a blue or underlined word on a webpage? If the answer is yes, you may have found yourself being redirected to a different web page. The web page can exist on the website being viewed or an external website.

If you were to analyse the picture above, the word web development services links to a webpage on the Amanzi Digital website, which is about our web development services. We are targeting “web development services” as one of our keywords and therefore need to try and earn links from other websites using the keyword in the anchor text.

The html code for the link can be seen as follows

Link Building for growth

The aim of link building is to acquire targeted anchor text links from related quality websites. By conducting thorough keyword research we are able to find the best keywords to target in our anchor text links and further optimise a landing page.

Optimising a landing page for targeted keywords (on page factors) counts for a small percentage of your search rankings, but is still very important. Google looks at a number of aspects when ranking a website. If Google were to rank websites based on its on page factors alone; it would have a big problem picking out the best website. Especially when there are a number of websites competing for the same keywords, that all have good on-page factors in place.

Google introduced the link system to combat this. A link is seen as a vote in Google’s eyes. Wikipedia is a prime example of this. They have acquired fantastic links from millions of websites that link to them as they are a credible source of information (Good luck to anybody trying to outrank them!).

So one thing we can be sure about is that link building is a vital component of any digital marketing strategy as it is one of the main keys to top search engine rankings.

At Amanzi Digital, we believe the best form of keyword research is to test keywords using Google AdWords prior to link building. This allows us to setup conversion tracking and focus on keywords that actually convert (turns into enquiries or leads) rather than gamble on keywords that achieve a high amount of search queries. Check out our PPC services for more information on this.

Now that we know what link building is, the next step is to have the ultimate link building strategy for 2013 in place. Got any questions or still unsure about link building? Please feel free to leave a comment below as we would love to hear from you.