What is link building?

A large part of online marketing, especially search engine marketing, revolves around link building. Link building is simply the process of getting other websites (that you do not control) to link to your website.

In the eyes of search engines like Bing and Google, links to your website from other websites act as, essentially, votes in favor of your website. Search engines also take into account factors of how good those other websites linking to your website really are. The better the websites linking to your website, the more the link (or vote) counts in your favor.

The more links you have, especially from good websites, the more your website will be trusted by Google and Bing. Links are one of many factors Bing, Google and other search engines use to determine if and where to show your website when somebody conducts a search. If you have lots of links from lots of good sites, your chances of showing up when people search for things related to your business improve dramatically.

What makes a site good to search engines (and how can you tell if your links are coming from a good website)? In general, good websites are authoritative websites within their niche. For instance, if you run a company selling dog toys getting a link from the leading dog trainer website would probably help. Getting a link from a highly trusted dog toy review website would probably help even more.

In addition to focusing on getting links from good websites, you also want to focus on getting links from lots of websites. A link from 10 websites is an okay start but a link from 20 websites is even better. In other words, if you have more websites linking to you then you have more voters (websites) casting votes (links) in your favor.

Ideally, you would like to have lots of unique good websites linking to your website. More importantly, it would be ideal if each website linked to your website in several different places.

Naturally, clients often ask how many links they should have. Should they have 100 links or 500 links? Should those links comes from 10 websites, 20 websites or hundreds of websites?

In general, the more links you can get and the more websites you can get linking to you, the better. However, when it comes to exact numbers for link building the answer depends on a lot of other factors. Some of those factors include:

1. What are your competitors doing? If they have 150 websites linking to them 1,500 times and you only have 50 websites linking to you 250 times then you need more links to your website. However, if you have 50 websites linking to you and your nearest competitor only has 20 websites linking to their website, then you might be okay.
2. Authoritative-ness of linking websites. If you have 20 really great and authoritative websites linking to you but your competitor has 100 so-so websites linking to them, your website might actually be treated with better regard by the search engines.
3. Non-link factors. As mentioned, search engines take into account hundreds and hundreds of different factors when evaluating your website. Non-link factors, including your website's content and your website's performance in other parts of the web, might offset a smaller number of links.

For help building links on your website, contact QW Consulting today about a free website review.