How important is link building to an SEO strategy?
The importance a network of links is one of the most important factors in determining the positioning of a website in search engine results . In practice, the search engines, starting with Google , consider the links that a site gets to be a positive signal regarding the life of the site. The more positive signals (links) a site receives, the more search engines consider it to be reliable and interesting. This is simply a case of search engines using a practice which is frequently applied in many other areas and even at different times of our lives – film reviews, restaurant reviews, word of mouth comments about a product or service, the government’s approval rating and so on and so forth. The saying “ Google loves you when other people love you ” means just that – the more people talk about a site, not least through the links that it receives, the more importance the site acquires in the eyes of the search engines and hence is ranked higher than identical sites without a good network of backlinks .
Unfortunately, developing a SEO strategy which includes link building which is safe as well as effective is easier said than done.
Why place so much emphasis on security?
The reason for this is very simple – ever since it was founded, Google has always aimed to provide reliable and qualitatively-appropriate results for searches and it is quite capable of excluding results from a specific site, or certain categories of sites, if it considers that black-hat techniques have been used to improve its indexing. Link Buildingwas definitely one of the most abused of all the SEO techniques and this has resulted in penalty and normalization actions by Google .
