If you have any sort of understanding of search engine optimization, chances are you have heard of Linkbuilding. It is a very important aspect of any SEO plan of attack and rightly so. Having links associated with your website helps you in a number of ways, with the overall goal of eventually scoring you a very high PageRank on Google, and great placement on other search engines as well.
First of all, there are two different kinds of links. There are links on your page that a user can click on that redirects them to another page. That would be titled an outbound link. Aside from SEO, be careful with these types of links, because a red flag is always raised in my head when there is a chance to guide people away from your site. The whole idea is to keep them there, right? Okay, so you get my point. It’s not a terrible thing to have outbound links on your site, in fact it will probably happen, just keep in mind where they are and how you are using them.
The second type of link is an inbound link. This is the opposite of the first link. This is a link from someone else’s website, that a user could click and be directed to your own website.
Okay, so what’s the difference? The difference is huge. Google basically treats the ranking game like high school. It’s all about popularity. If there are links on other people’s websites pointing to your website, you look very popular. Especially compared with the website that doesn’t really work out, is kind of nerdy, has acne, and smells weird.
Google looks at the websites with more links as being more popular. It’s like a voting contest. The one with the most votes (links) wins a better PageRank. Now, please understand this is but one of the 150ish different aspects Google takes into account in its algorithm. But also note it is an important one.
I can’t tell you how many times I have created a gap analysis for customers to find out a main reason they are ranking lower than their competition is because they have 100 links and their competition has 35,000. Not uncommon.
So continue to create links for your business. Go out and write articles, FaceBook, Twitter, do all sorts of stuff. However, keep in mind when you do these things that you mention your website in proper linking format so you constantly birth new links for your website, and ultimately, your rankings.
