The Importance of Link Building

The importance of external link building just cannot be underestimated when it comes to your web marketing strategy (I used the term external link building because we are talking about external links to your website not internal on page links which is an all together different subject).

Simply speaking without them you will not be getting free organic web traffic from the search engines.

Equally Google or any other of the search engines for that matter will be in no great hurry to index your site because you won’t be very visible to them unless of course you have totally unique content on the latest hot trend, and nobody else has.

Why Is Link Building Important So Important

So why exactly is link building so important? I think it is probably easiest to liken it to a fishing analogy so as not to get overly complicated bearing in mind we are trying to get web traffic not become search engine optimisation experts.

In this scenario imagine your website is the fisherman and you are selling red worms (bear with me on this, no laughing please), the fish are the bots (web robots) and they go looking for the juiciest bait (your content) and then report back to the big fish (Google) where it can find the best food it can bring its family (web traffic) to feast on.

The lake is huge and there are thousands of other fishermen around it as well but you set up your rod and wait. Meanwhile under the surface the fish (bot) swims past, sees your solitary red worm and moves on (nothing special here).

Being a wiser fisherman than the rest of the crowd you have a strategy and pull out another rod (link), and another and another until you have many many rods (links) in the water.

Now when the fish swims by it sees lots of red worms and by the magic of duplication lots of other fish (bots) see your worms as well and all swim off back to Google to tell it what a wonderful feast of red worms it has found.

Google will then send over the family members that want red worms and you start to get a feeding frenzy (web traffic).

Real Life Examples

Now just in case there is the odd sceptic out there lets look at a real life study of this.

A search for Red Worms on Google.com brought up 382,000 results so all in all not a too competitive phrase

First place in Google goes to:

Cityfarmer.org. Have a look at the number of links going to this site. Over 20,000! But equally more important when we discuss deep linking later, you will notice that this is not even the home page but a secondary page. This page alone has nearly 1000 in-links.

This site clearly has a serious defined linking strategy which a good part of the reason it is number 1 in the Google rankings.

A little further down the page we have Redwormcomposting.com.

This site also has a good home page linking strategy but only has less than 200 in-links to its sub pages so this sites search engine position would be vulnerable to a site with a better balanced strategy involving deep linking for example.

Bottom of page 1 (still better than most) we have Wackyworldsof.com.

Again this site has a clear strategy both for the home page and deep links and now that you are starting to understand the importance of link building for web success, you can also see that it would not take a great effort to lift this site another 4 places up the rankings in a relatively short time period.

Just to highlight the point a little deeper if we go to page 3 of Google for example top of the page at number 30 we have Topline-2000.com.

 We see some linking strategy but clearly not enough to get it further up the rankings to a first page position.

And finally on page 4 we have Deckerwormsales.com who has done a little basic link building just to the home page the sad thing is that in reality it would only take a relatively small effort to get this site to the second page of Google.

That said this site still has more in-links than a majority of websites in this or many other market arenas.

Now that you have seen the importance of link building hopefully you have started to realise just what you need to be doing in order to make your website more successful but now lets look at The Sheer Power of Deep Linking (and some more fishing tales).

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