Link building is a necessary part of any SEO campaign, but in order to be successful, you have to stay current on the ever-changing landscape of SEO, SEM and link building, as the experts at Liquori Co do. In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of link building and its role in search engine marketing.
What is link building?
Hyperlinks- we’ll refer to them as links- provide an essential tool for online navigation. Say you’re reading an article and see a link (usually in blue or somehow stands out from the rest of the content) to something that interests you, or an idea you want to find out more information on, you click it. Links provide a path for you to follow on the route to acquiring more information.
Google, Yahoo and other search engines crawl the web through links, making your site and its related links more recognizable to search engines, which make them pop up more and/or in higher ranking on search engine results pages. A majority of SEO experts find link building to be one of the more difficult tasks for which they are responsible, making it all the more important for you to shine- in order to jump in front of your competition and “win” more web traffic, with the help of Google, etc. recognizing your site and pushing it into the top results.
Breakdown: The makeup of a hyperlink
Anchor tag, “a”: This is the first part of a link; it alerts search engines that there’s a link coming up, so to speak.
Referral location, “href”: Stands for hyperlink referral. After that code, there will be text inside quotation marks, which indicates the webpage, image or file download the URL will bring the user to.
Visible link/anchor text: The user actually sees this part of the equation- for example, you’re reading an article on a website about SEO and there’s a word or words either in blue font or underlined, somehow showing it’s a hyperlink- such as “SEO tips,” “Find out more,” or “Contact us”- that’s the visible/anchor text of a link, which brings you to another page either within the same site or onto another, depending on the situation.
Link tag closure: The final step to building a link- it informs search engines of the end of a link tag.
Stay tuned for the second blog covering this topic to find out more soon!
