The Basics of Link Building

The concept of ‘link building’ is essentially basic, but can be difficult to grasp for many people not familiar with internet terms and functionality.

‘Links’ is a word thats thrown around a lot in web development and internet marketing. A ‘Link’ is a connection, or a ‘road’ connecting one web page (or website) to another web page (or website). So for example, when I say that Google is a Search Engine, the word ‘Search Engine’ is a ‘link’ to www.google.com (If you were to click on it, it would take you to Google, so it’s a link to that site). In many cases, a ‘link’ is formatted differently on a website, classically being blue text with an underline.

There are essentially three types of links. There are ‘External Outbound’ and ‘External Inbound’ links and ‘Internal Links’.

External links are links that direct to a webpage or website outside of the domain the link is present on. So for example, the “Search Engine” link to Google I posted above is considered an External OUTBOUND Link because it’s pointing outside of www.motoza.com. If Google were to have a link to www.motoza.com from their website, then that link would be considered an External INBOUND link.

An internal link is any connection between between web pages within your site. So if I said our Internet Marketing Blog is fantastic, that link is internal since the connection is still within the Motoza website.

Now that a link is defined, it’s important to see how it relates to search engine optimization. When Google visits a website, it uses these ‘links’ to determine the subject matter and trustworthiness of a website.  So for example, if you have a website dedicated to the side effects of Penicillin, Google will look at the source of any external inbound links to determine how trustworthy your information is. If they notice a prominent link coming from www.webmd.com, it holds a lot more weight than if it came from an unknown personal medical research blog. The more relevant, quality inbound links you have, the better chances of Google perceiving your site as relevant and trustworthy.

SEO works very similar to a popularity election. In general, websites that have more inbound links (votes) will usually be considered higher quality and more relevant. www.wedmd.com has over 14 million inbound links (people linking to them), if you compare that you a personal medical blog that might have…50 links, you can see why Google would prefer WebMD over the blog.

However, as I noted above, the quality of the source of those links plays a big part. Almost anytime you have an inbound link, you gain a bit more ‘power’. In the SEO industry this is referred to as ‘link juice’. The amount of ‘link juice’ you get from one source differs from another based on the quality of the site, the placement of your link and how many links that website is sending out. Link Juice gained from WebMD would be much greater than that from an unrelevant medical blog. However, if your link portfolio is made up of 20 WebMD-style links, and your competitor has over 500 lower-quality links, the ‘link juice’ might be around the same. It’s quantity versus quality.

In a proper SEO campaign, it’s important to find a good balance between many links, and a few great links. By concentrating on building good relationships with strong websites, and also using approved tactics to spread your name (and link) to as many relevant websites as possible, you will eventually achieve this goal.

Advanced link building analysis can get fairly complicated. However, to summarize, it all comes down to one thing: More Link Juice = Higher Search Engine Results.