The best metaphor for link building that we have seen out there is fishing. If you think about it, what are some of the main components you need to be successful at fishing? You need to understand your environment, you need reliable bait, it takes time if you want the quality catch and your strategy evolves as your experience does. Although this is just a metaphor, it can be directly correlated, but how does link building work? We will be going over the 3 different parts of link building, how they work, and how important they are to your SEO. 
External Link Building
When thinking of external link building it comes down to supporting the content on your website. If you are writing about what SEO is, it would make sense for you to link to a resource that tells someone what SEO is. Why is it important? You are showing the search engines and your users that you have other sources supporting your content. Think back to just before this with the fishing reference, this would be related to having reliable bait. How reliable is your content, search engines want to make sure the best content comes up first.
Internal Link Building
Google holds user experience at the forefront of how they rank websites. Internal link building is how your website is connected. You want the pages on your website to point to the other pages that make sense. For instance, if you have a call to action button on your homepage, it would make sense to link to a contact page. In addition, if you are producing supplemental content, it would make sense for you to link that content to the page on your website surrounding that keyword.
Linking Root Domains
This is where understanding your environment and taking your time for the quality catch comes into play. You will not find any bigger ROI for your SEO efforts than acquiring linking root domains. There are a few different types and ways to get linking root domains.
- Niche Directories – Whatever industry you’re in or service you provide, it is important to make sure your business and website is listed in those online directories. Not only does it get your brand out there, but it also counts as a link back to you.
- Guest Posts – Although the most time consuming and almost always carry a cost, these are very valuable for your brand and SEO. Guest posts are your content living on another website. The general rule of thumb is to make sure the website is relevant to your industry and the content is valuable. Google has come a long way since the penguin update.
Google is basically a big popularity contest and root domains count as votes for your website. The more votes the better, just make sure you follow the steps above to ensure they’re quality. As it goes with the fishing metaphor, evolve your strategy and it takes time for the perfect catch. Acquiring these quality links over time will bring you the quality rankings.
Why Link Building is Important to your SEO
As you have probably gathered by now, link building is important to your SEO. Not just for how other websites on the internet perceive you, but also how users can interact with your website. Everything that we know about Google’s algorithm and other search engines is that they look at both of these factors while ranking a website to make sure they are giving the query the best possible response. We hope that this has answered the question, how does link building work. If you want to know more about link building contact one of our SEO experts.
