subject: What Is Link Building? [print this page] Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is a complicated business with many things to understand and implement. To go through everything would take a long time and besides there are some great resources elsewhere online. This article is all about the importance of building links. So basically, to achieve decent rankings in Google or Yahoo, 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, in simple terms that is what building links is all about.
A link from another website to your website is called an 'inbound link' or a 'backlink'. This link points to your website, so that when someone clicks the link on the other site, they arrive at your site - so they are inbound. But why do you even need these inbound links? Well, when Google crawls through your pages, they are also looking to see just who is linking to your site.
There's a an awful lot to learn about link building - you'll soon find yourself with a whole new vocabulary of words such as overcooking, link exchange, incestuous linking, reciprocal linking, under cookingmulti-linking, over linking, under linking, link doping, link bait, three-way linking, automated linking and link popularity.
In fact, there is so much to learn about building links that entire books and websites have been written on the subject. Many dedicated link builders and SEOs and spend a great deal of time just building inbound links.
The search engines like Google and Yahoo decide how important your website is by checking to see WHO is linking to you - not how MANY people are linking to you, although of course, this used to be the case. These days, according to the main search engines, it's not how many people you know, but who you know that counts...and you thought you left the popularity contests behind in school! If you can get a followed link from a PR4 site that is more important to the search engines than 10 unfollowed links from 10 PR1 sites.
