The Importance of Link Building
Link building is a process of collecting links from other websites. From the technical point of view, backlinks are hypertext links that serve as navigation among websites. The links are crawled by search engines.
Search engines use links to explore new websites and to set the overall ranking of a website in SERP. In other words, they explore new content and determine the authority of a website based on the authority passed from external sources.
This means that a website’s link profile remains one of the most valuable SEO ranking factors.
When looking at the importance of link building for SEO purposes we can distinguish between external link building and internal link building. Internal link building means using a link pointing from one page to another page on the same domain.
Types of backlinks
Generally speaking, there are two types of backlinks:
> Do follow (authority passing)
> No follow
Do follow backlinks pass the external source authority to the linked website. Imagine the backlink as a point that boosts SEO of the website, often called the “link juice”.
No follow backlinks don’t score any points to the linked website. They don’t pass the external source authority because of the specific HTML tag that tells crawlers not to count it.
Quality aspects of backlinks
Google considers multiple quality aspects of the referring websites:
> Domain Authority
> Page Authority
> Other link profile quality metrics
Relevancy
Links referring to a website have to be relevant to its content. Don’t acquire a backlink from a clothes e-shop if you write a blog about pizza.
Link placement
Links placed in the main articles or sections are better than links in footers and sidebars. Single links tend to be more valuable than sitewide links.
Sitewide links appear on all pages of a website. They are usually in the footer, header, sidebar or blogrolls. Sitewide links are great both for internal and external link building.
Importance of Link Building
They can generate a lot of traffic. Don’t get scared by them but make sure to use only natural links and keep in mind that their SEO potential may be a bit lower when compared to single links. Besides the aspects mentioned above, we need to consider the freshness of the link, the anchor quality, popularity and social signals.
