Chapter 1: What Is Link Building?
Link building is the process of obtaining links to your webpages from external websites. These links are known as both inbound links and backlinks. Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that backlinks are among the most important factors in Organic SEO Ranking, and acquiring high-quality relevant backlinks is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Quality and relevant backlinks help search engines determine how popular and trustworthy a particular website is. We will talk about what high quality and relevant backlinks are later in this guide. For now, think of backlinks as votes from other websites on the internet. Let’s say there are two websites of equally high-quality content, great on-page SEO, same domain age, same load time, regularly updated content and everything else equal, the website that has the most votes (i.e. quality and relevant backlinks) is most likely the most trusted website on a particular subject matter and, hence, deserves to be in top organic SEO positions on Google and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.
The Evolution of Google Search Engine
The evolution of Google search has been nothing short of phenomenal. In the early days of Google, Websites were mainly ranked on the basis of keywords, on-page content and the number of hyperlinks found on the site’s pages. The basic idea was that if a website had a lot of links, the content on that website must be good. Now, Google largely determines a website’s value by the number of high-quality backlinks the webpages have. So, even if you have a lot of good quality content, without backlinks, it will take Google much longer to recognize your site as valuable.
