You may be asking yourself, “what is link building and why should I be doing it?” If you’re saying this, then you’re probably just getting started online. In essence, link building is the most fundamental aspect of online reputation management. Just as your friends would recommend you, other “friendly” websites should also recommend your site.
Friends Recommend Friends
The more friends you have in real life, the larger your circle of influence. If you have 100 friends – all of whom recommend your goods or services – then that certainly says something about you. Now, if you have 100 other websites who “recommend” your goods or services, then that certainly says good things about your website.
Building online links is just like building relationships. If your website is linked in from many other sites, then it’s a way of building your reputation and your reach online. Not only does this help influence others from these “friendly” sites to visit your site, it also helps in organic search engines.
Search Engines
You see, Google/Yahoo/Bing/every search engine ever invented doesn’t want to show you a bunch of fly-by-night websites. In order to get their users the best results possible, it goes out into the world wide web and looks for websites that are well “recommended” by “friendly” websites. You see where this is going?
So the more websites that reference your URL, the more that search engines trust your website and the more likely you are to show up higher in search results. Just like in real life, you need people to vouch for your goods/services and the web is no different. Instead of people, though, think websites.
Added Hint: Strong links are put in the body of text and come from related websites. For instance, you’ll get a lot more visibility and stronger recommendation if your food review website is mentioned on Zagat.com as opposed to MyPetPonies.com. Think relevant, act big.
