What is Link Building?

Link Building, simply enough is the process of getting links from other websites to point at your site.

This is the way that Google and other Search Engines, such as Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc assess the popularity of a particular website. Much in the same way that an election works, so does linking; the person with the most votes wins. The website with the most links pointing at it gets the highest in the search engine rankings, or SERPs. (Search Engine Results Pages).

Larry Page and Serge Brin; the founders of Google, devised a special way of counting all these links, called PageRank. PageRank is the basis of Google and how it works. The maths and science behind pagerank, is quite complicated, but in a nutshell, it is an algorythmn that calculates all the links on the Internet. It then gives a score to a webpage, based on the amount of links that website page is receiving. It works by both assessing the links to that webpage and from that webpage. A link to a webpage is called a backlink. But be aware all links are not the same.

This is a very important point to remember when link building. For example: If I have 10 links pointing at a webpage and 1 link from that webpage, that one link is going to be very powerful. If I have 1 link to a webpage and 10 links from that webpage, those 10 links will not be very powerful.

Have a look at the pagerank toolbar from Google. You can add this to your google toolbar. Although it is not very accurate, (Google for trade reasons will never give a completely accurate picture) it is a fantastic way of assess the value of the link you are getting. The pagerank tool gives a score from 1 to 10 of the importance of that website. (how many links it has pointing at it) No one knows if this is entirely accurate apart from the people at Google, but it will show you how the pagerank score is created.

It is always best to get links from webpages with a highpage rank. For example if you got the BBC (which has a pagerank of 9) to link to your website from their home page - your job as an SEO would probably be over! This is because the BBC website is one of the best websites on the Internet. It has hundreds of thousands of links, thousands of pages with unique well written content.

It is nearly impossible to get links from pages with a pagerank over 6, because of the value of these links. A good rule of thumb is never bother with webpages with a pagerank of 0. The best you are likely to get is 1-3. In my experience the best I have every got is a 6, but this took a lot of wrangling, trading, exchanging my own links.

Pagerank only works as a guide to getting links. Sometimes a website is waiting to have a pagerank score added to it. If you think the website looks good, is related to yours and could be valuable resource - get the link anyway!

Fred Dinbar is the Director of SEO Brighton a SEO Consultant Brighton. For expert SEO Brighton services SEO Brighton is a fantastically informative blog for those interested in SEO.