As you improve site visibility, you should know that link building remains one of the most effective SEO tactics. Because Google continues to consider high-quality backlinks to determine a site's credibility, investing in a link building campaign can give you more opportunities for ranking and conversion. The ultimate goal of link building is to ensure that your site page ranks higher than your competitors on search engine results pages (SERP). The higher your page ranks in the SERPs, the higher the visibility of your page and the more you can increase your website traffic.
Good link building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your niche. There are some link building techniques, such as content creation, that can show people the experience of your company, and this can go a long way in building your brand. For example, if you create content based on industry data and publish it, you have the potential to make yourself known in your industry. When you do outreach and try to get links to content, you're demonstrating your expertise and asking others in your industry to help spread the word and show the same to others.
Link building is an important ranking factor in SEO. Increase traffic, sales, and where you reach Google search results. Link building is just a hyperlink from one website to another. Nearly 20 years later, links are STILL the best way to determine the quality of a web page.
That's why backlinks are still Google's benchmark ranking signal. Link building is not a quick or easy solution to search rankings, as it requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. That said, backlinks are still a valuable resource that can be an important part of exposing your website properties to search engines. While they are no longer the only search signal worth worrying about, they are still very important to the major search engines.
When combined with strong SEO technical foundations, excellent on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience, link building can be very effective in generating more organic traffic. Both Google and search engines have been using links to rank websites since their inception, and the importance of links in ranking will not change soon. Emily Garner, Content Specialist at Blue Claw, agrees, stating that “Running link building campaigns works to increase brand awareness and increase the likelihood that you will become the go-to site for many customers looking for reliability and convenience. None of these activities, creating a great product and creating a great piece of content, will have been done due to the benefit of link building, but links are a consequence of the activity.
However, as search engine algorithms have evolved, more and more signals are being taken into account when ranking websites, so link building is still important today. This has also led Google to start discarding a number of link building techniques that previously worked well; for example, sending your website to web directories and getting a link in return. Arguably, link building these days is more like great marketing, and organizations that understand this are often the ones that win in the long run. An algorithmic penalty that specifically targets sites that use spammy link building techniques (such as suspicious guest posting and blog comment spam).
To understand the importance of link building, it's important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how search engines view links, and what they can interpret from them. In SEO, link building is the practice of obtaining high-quality inbound links (also called backlinks) to a web page. Within SEO, link building plays an important role in driving organic traffic through search engines, especially in competitive industries. .
