What is all the fuss about links to your website? Why such a push on link building services? What in the world is link building? In this article I will discuss what link building is, the importance of it and how to incorporate it into your Internet Marketing Plan.

Link building is the process of getting links to your website from other sites, especially high traffic, industry specific sites. Getting links to your web site used to be an easy task, just get as many incoming links to your site as possible, quality and nature or the links was unimportant. Then link relevance came along; search engines now take into account the quality and relevance of your site’s incoming links. This makes the process of link building a much more complicated program. With all of the other tasks that business owners have, link building may not be high on the priority list. It may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing firm to help.

Some concepts to know when embarking on a link building campaign:

Page Rank: is the value that the search engines give to a web page. It is usually on a scale of 1 to 10.

Link Popularity: is the number to links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher the more “incoming” links that your site has and puts weight on those sites as well.

Building link popularity helps to gain higher page rank for your web site. The higher the page rank, the higher your site will appear on the search engines with competitive keywords. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use link popularity to determine how important your site is in order to give it a rank in search results. The more incoming links a site has, the more important or valuable it must be.

In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity. It is important to choose quality sites to link to yours. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. For example, if you sell insurance, a link from an insurance information site would benefit your business more than just a link on a general “catch all” link site.

Probably the most important benefit of having a high number of quality links to your site is the effect it has on the search engine rankings. Most of the major search engines use “link popularity” as a main factor in determining where your site should rank. If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines will think it is a popular site and give it a high page rank. Building quality and relevant links has two advantages; you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.

A complete link building program involves generating links to your site from a variety of sources. This includes directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles and press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes fee-based. Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site. It does take patients and skill, however, to utilize blogs and social networks to generate links; it may be best to leave this to a professional SEO company to do for you.

Besides social networks, blogs and directories, article sites are another way to create incoming links to your site. Article sites usually only allow links in the resource box of your articles, not in the text of the article itself. The links generated here are permanent links, unlike directories and blogs where links might be deleted. Article sites rarely delete articles. Article writing also makes you the “expert” on the subject you are writing about, making it more likely that people will want to visit your site. Article submission can be a tedious process, best left to the professional SEO company.