The Importance of Link Building to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Smart link building can dramatically improve search engine rankings of almost any site. This has been true for years, and appears to be even truer since Google’s Panda update, which shook up the rankings for many extremely high profile websites. The fact is, link building is not a new concept in search engine rankings. If anything, it actually predates most SEO strategies. Quality inbound links were the first “search engine” – good sites with high-quality content spread by word of mouth. Today, inbound links are one of the many factors that Google and other search engines consider when deciding which pages to serve up when someone enters a query into the search engine. If you’re trying to improve search engine rankings on your websites, link building must be part of your overall SEO strategy, and here’s why.

How Inbound Links Improve Search Engine Rankings

Think of the World Wide Web as a giant road map. Your website occupies a space on that map and the job of your search engine marketing strategy is to attract visitors to your little patch of land. In that scenario, inbound links serve the same purpose as road signs on the highway. They point the way to your website, both for other people and for the search engine spiders – the programs that crawl the web and index all the web pages they visit.

Ideally, the more links – road signs – that point to your website, the better it is for your search engine ranking. However, there are a few problems with this scenario. It’s far too easy to exploit the role that links play in pointing the search engine bots at your site to improve search engine ranking artificially. That’s why most search engines use an algorithm to determine what those links say about your website.

A lot of inbound links suggests that your website offers information that many visitors found helpful and useful. The search engineers decided long ago that if a lot of people find your website interesting enough to link to, there’s a good chance that there’s something worth reading there. To be sure that they’re sending people to sites that are relevant to the searcher’s query, the algorithm also determines how many of the links pointing to your website come from other websites that are about the same thing. For example, if the searcher enters “trout fishing” into the search box, the search engine checks to see how many of the websites that link back to your page are about trout fishing.

Google also includes links to your website in their calculation of Page Rank, which determines how high in the search engine results page your website will be listed. The more relevant links point back to your website, the higher your page rank is likely to be – and higher page rank is always better.

As you can see, link building is an important part of your quest to improve search engine rankings, but it has to be smart link building. When you include a link building campaign as part of an overall SEO strategy to boost your rankings and visibility in the search engine results, you’ll increase your chances of a successful campaign.