With the marketplace moving to cyberspace, your business website can matter just as much as your mortar-and-brick shop. In fact, depending on the type of goods and services you offer and the effectiveness of your link building campaign, your consumers could be largely composed of online customers. In this article, we provide you basic information on what it takes to run a link building campaign for your business website.
Link building refers to a strategised and systematic effort to generate incoming links to your business web page. The amount of incoming links to your web page significantly affects its search engine result pages (SERP) or page rank (PR). If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, here is a simple way to learn all about them: go to your preferred search engine and type in some general keywords that any other person would use when searching for the particular good or service that you carry. To make it more realistic, assume that the person searching on the internet is not aware of your company at all (which is the case in most cases for people doing non-specific internet searches in the first place). When you hit enter, the search engine would display pages and pages of search results. Now, as a typical consumer, you would naturally pay attention to those results who happen to be listed on the first page, won’t you? You are unlikely to spend extra effort just to read search results listed beyond the first two pages, if at all. Right then and there, you can see how important it is to place high on SERP or PR.
Link building increases SERP or PR by increasing your business website’s relevance. Search engine algorithms are so sophisticated that they can compute for search relevance in less than a second. Search engines can do this at lightning speed because the contents of established websites are indexed, or filed systematically. Incoming, or inbound links to your website is some sort of cross-referencing. Having quality links persuades search engines that your content is important; when your business website is linked to a lot of established and popular websites, your site gets indexed faster and more thoroughly as well.
There are certain legitimate techniques that you can use to create quality links to your business website. It is important to note that there are legitimate (white hat) and illegitimate (black hat) link building strategies. As with everything else, legitimate strategies are more labor-intensive and time-consuming, but they result in links that are significant. On the other hand, while black hat strategies may be easier, they eventually become useless since search engine algorithms are constantly being developed to weed out such black hat strategies. In fact, when you stoop to using black hat strategies, your business website could be penalized by losing its indexing. When that happens, your website will no longer place at all in SERPs.
