What Is Link Building?
Put simply, link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website.
The primary purpose of link building is to increase a website's authority by getting high-quality inbound links (links from other sites to yours).
Why Is Link Building Important?
It’s long been known that backlinks are one of Google’s ranking factors, and often (but not always), the more high-quality backlinks a site has, the higher it’ll rank on the search engine results pages.
These backlinks are viewed by Google as “votes of confidence”, showing that your site is trustworthy, valuable and credible. If someone is linking to your site, there must be a good reason for that, right?
What Makes A Good Backlink?
Not all links have the same power though, there are a couple of things to look out for that define a ‘good’ backlink - one that’s going to be more beneficial for you.
Authority. A link from a high-authority (high DA) website is often more valuable than a link from a website with a low domain authority. For example, a link from the BBC is much more valuable than a link from a spammy news site.
Relevancy. A link from a relevant site that correlates to your site is much more valuable than a link from a completely unrelated site. This means links from websites within your industry or niche are much more appealing to search engines.
Anchor Text. This is the actual text that links out to your website. It’s important because search engines will use this to determine what the page is about. The more relevance, the better the link! Similar to the relevancy above, it’s all about increasing topical authority here, showing your site is a leading voice in your industry.
Can You Increase Rankings Without Link Building?
Absolutely!
It’s often argued more recently that Google is moving their key ranking signals away from links, with Gary Illyes from Google saying he wouldn’t even put links into the top 3 ranking signals that Google uses! And this is something that’s caused quite a stir within the SEO world, especially with the more traditional marketers.
However, this is backed up by several Googlers making similar comments about the decline of the importance and significance of links for ranking.
Obviously link building is significant, but it’s now important to remember that it's just one of many things to consider when working on your SEO.
Our Thoughts
Here at Arise, we believe in a well-rounded SEO approach, from on-page right through to off-page, and link building is most definitely a part of any good SEO strategy. But is it the most important part? Probably not (in our opinion).
SEO involves a lot of different techniques, strategies and tasks, and link building is just one of many.
As a specialist SEO agency, we’ve seen a great deal of success in the past for clients with very minimal authority and a low backlink profile through the utilisation of other SEO methods, without focusing too much on link building.
We’re not saying that link building wouldn’t improve things further, but as mentioned previously, in our (and Google’s) opinion, it’s no longer one of the most important factors. There’s other things to focus on that’s likely to have a large impact.
If you’re looking for help with your SEO, get in touch with our team to see how we can help you get found!