What Is Building Links All About?

In the world of Internet Marketing, there is a lot to know, understand, and keep up with. In this community, we hear about ‘building links’ a great deal. But what is building links really all about?

The fact is that for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO), you need other website owners to include a link to your site from their site. There is, of course, a great deal more to it than just getting a simple link on someone else’s site, as you will soon learn, but that is the basic answer as to what building links is all about.

These links are called ‘inbound links.’ This means that the link points to your website, so that when someone clicks the link, they arrive at your website – they are inbound. An outbound link means that there is a link on your page that when clicked, takes the visitor to someone else’s website – it is outbound.

But why do you need these inbound links? When search engines crawl through your pages, they are also looking to see who is linking to your site. There was a time when the quantity of the links mattered more than the quality of those links. Website owners around the globe went virtually crazy trying to get as many inbound links as possible, visiting link farms and essentially creating link farms of their own – on their own site – in order to exchange links with other website owners.

The search engine companies soon realized that this was not conducive to producing better – relevant – search results, and they changed things up over time. Now, the number of inbound links that one has isn’t as important as where the links you do have come from. In fact, these days it isn’t healthy – in the eyes of the search engines – to have an over abundance of inbound links, unless they are from what is considered authority sites.

The search engines also become suspicious – and start penalizing sites – when they build too many inbound links in too short a period of time. Search engines are becoming quite picky about these things, and in order to protect your site, while promoting it, you need to be fully aware of just how discerning the search engines can be.

There is a great deal that one can learn about the wonderfully world of link building – a long with an entire new vocabulary of words and phrases such as reciprocal linking, multi-linking, three-way linking, automated linking, link exchange, incestuous linking, over linking, under linking, link doping, link bait, and of course link popularity.

There is so much to learn about linking that entire courses have been written on the topic – and many marketers spend a great deal of time building inbound links. Fortunately for you, you don’t have to do this. You don’t really have to understand all of the terminology or the strategies. You don’t have to spend weeks – or even days – building links.

Of all of the terminology associated with link building, there is actually very little of it that you need to understand. You need to understand what link popularity means – to the search engines – because that is exactly what it needs to mean to you.

Look at it this way: are you getting your link on other sites so that the little bit of traffic on those sites will come to your site – or are you getting links on other site so that the search engines will see that your site is a popular site, raising you listing in the search results, which will be seen by thousands of people? Link popularity is something you need to understand.

The search engines determine how important your site is by looking to see who is linking to you – not how many people are linking to you, although this used to be the case. These days, in the search engines opinion, it’s not how many people you know, but who you know that counts…and you thought you left the popularity contests behind in high school!

You could say that search engines have become followers of the crowd. They are the ones that will always do or agree with whatever it is that the most popular girl is doing or saying. Go to the search engine right now and type in your main keyword. Take a look at the search results. Skip the paid listings, and look at the natural results. The site in the number one spot is the most popular girl in this class.

Now, look at that site. It most likely has a page rank of five or higher. If you check that site out on Alexa, at http://www.alexa.com, you will most likely see that it has an abundance of inbound links – but if you look at the site, you will note that it does not have very many outbound links – if any at all. The most popular girl doesn’t have to link to others in order to get them to link to her. She can get people to link to her by just doing what she naturally does.

The good news is that you don’t have to work very hard to become the most popular boy or girl in your niche. All you need to do is to follow some simple, natural linking techniques, and your star will rise!