News: Introduction to Link Building

This article is going to cover the basics of link building. Why do we want to build links? First of all, what is a link? A link is a hyperlink, actually. You click on it and it brings you to another webpage. I'm sure you've all clicked on links before. Well, what we want to do is we want to build links from other sites back to our own site. Why do we want to do this? Google's problem, as I see it, and this is based on thousands of hours of research, reading articles and watching videos and listening to experts who know more than I do about this type of stuff, is that they can't read content the way you or I do.

So what does this mean? It means that they have to rely on other factors to decide whose content is the most relevant for a particular keyword search phrase and whose content has the most authority.

Great content and links are the two things that most SEO people agree on as being the most important thing in terms of your page rank with Google, traffic you are going to get, and your search engine results. Showing up on the first page of Google search engine results is what we all want. This is what all these people agree. It is most important. Content and links.

Here's why links are important. They are part of the algorithm that Google uses and people think it's an important part of the 200 different factors that are in the algorithm. Links is definitely one of them and as I said most people consider them to be quite important. The problem Google has is when it goes to your webpage, let's say your website is about organic dog food and you have content on there about organic dog food, then it goes to another site about organic dog food and brings all this information back into the database it has.

So it has all this text in there. The problem is that, at least for now since Google doesn't appear to have any artificial intelligence programs working in their search engine robots or whatever, for now they really can't read this text like we do. They can look at it. They can see what words are there. They can make a judgment about the content of the page, based on what words it sees, but can it tell which content is better than other content? Not really. You got website A and website B. which one is better? Which one's more relevant to the search? Which one has better content for organic dog food?

They really can't make that decision, which is why they have an algorithm in the first place. If they knew which was the best content, if their robots could go into a site and read the sites and know which is the best content, then they wouldn't need any other factors in the algorithm. They wouldn't have to have an algorithm with 200 factors in it. They would know which is the best content and what site, or what page, should be pulled up when someone types in organic dog food.

So they have to rely on these other factors. Links are one of them. The more links you have coming into your site the higher Google will rank you. This is the prevailing thought among SEO people. Why is this? They feel (search engines) that if another site links to you it's almost like a vote of confidence. They feel that this other site will link to you because if you have good content, then their readers can go and read your content also.

This is the basic theory. This is why you need more links and, importantly too, more links from good sources. You want to have links that come from highly ranked webpages with a high page rank. Some of the best sites to have link to your site are social media bookmarking sites and the easiest way to get links on these sites is to use a software tool that we have called Onlywire.

Onlywire is great because it automatically creates bookmarks on about 40 big social media and social bookmarking sites for every page that you have on your site. In my next article I'm going to describe to you exactly how to use Onlywire to create great links back to your site easily and quickly.

Tom Aikins is an SEO consultant and online marketing expert based in Bangkok who presents seminars on these subjects and also offers a complete online marketing training course on his website, http://www.seonorthamerica.com. You can ask questions of him by contacting tom.aikins@gmail.com.