The basics of link building

You can think of links as votes. When other websites are linking to your page, it tells Google that your page is somehow important. Which is essentially Google’s PageRank algorithm in a nutshell.

So the more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it tends to rank in Google. And if you want to outrank it with your own page, you’ll likely need to get more links than it has.

I obviously oversimplified things quite a bit. Ranking #1 in Google is a lot more nuanced than just getting more links, because links aren’t the only ranking signal that Google uses. But it’s a very strong signal nevertheless, and it has a very direct influence on your search rankings.

So what is link building, and how do you do it?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Its purpose is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic.

Let’s get a bit deeper into that.