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20. oktober 2021
What is link building?
Link building is an SEO discipline where you actively work to get external websites to link to a specific page on your own website. The links that point to your website are called backlinks. There are many different methods link building specialists can use to acquire these backlinks, such as blog posts, sponsored articles, and…
Indhold
Hvad er det Links er en stemme Google lytter til links Undervurderet disciplin Fordele ved linkbuilding 1 godt link vs. 100 dårligeYou now know that link building is about getting other sites to link to your website using a wide range of methods—so now everything suddenly makes sense, right? Not quite, does it?
I also spent quite some time gaining a solid understanding of what this abstract concept is about, but do not worry—here is a practical explanation of link building that I am sure you will understand.
Think of links as votes for your website
The best way to understand what link building is about, and why it matters, is to think of links as votes and positive feedback on your content and your website.
Very few of us buy an expensive TV or sound system online without doing some research and checking what other people think about the same product. If there are many positive reviews, it is probably a good product, whereas if there are many negative responses, you should likely look for alternatives.
That is exactly how you should think about links and link building—as votes for your website! Keep in mind that Google is a search engine that constantly needs to deliver the most relevant result depending on what you search for.
Beyond the content on each individual website, how on earth is Google supposed to determine what is relevant and what is not? The answer is simple—by polling the web to see what other websites think about your website.
A link is a direct recommendation to Google
People often say that Google knows everything. But that is not true. Google knows most things, but it does not always know what the most relevant content on the web is, so we need to tell Google—and that is what we use links for!
The more websites that link to a page on your website, the more relevant it will appear in Google’s eyes. Link building is therefore a tool we use to actively tell Google that our website is more relevant than other websites, in an effort to rank higher in the search results.
Read here how you can get links to your site via “mentions”.
Link building – The most underrated SEO discipline
I mentioned in the introduction that link building is an SEO discipline, but when it comes to ranking higher in the search results, most people associate SEO with adapting the content on their website to the keywords people search for—in other words, on-page SEO.
Link building, on the other hand, is a discipline that takes place outside your website and therefore falls under off-page SEO. However, it is a shame that most people put the majority of their energy into on-page SEO and thereby underestimate link building, as link building has increasingly been recognised as the single most important and effective part of your website’s search engine optimisation.
All the votes your website receives from external websites create credibility and authority in Google’s eyes.
What is the best thing about link building?
Link building also has the advantage that you can work on improving rankings for specific subpages on your website that are tailored to specific keywords.
This is how it works: Google looks at both the page the link comes from and the page it points to. If Google can see that the content on both pages is relevant to each other, then Google will consider the page highly relevant to what is being searched for.
Link building is therefore a tool that can be used to work with very specific keywords and subpages you want to rank for. The more votes you have that your page content is relevant, the higher you can climb in the rankings.
1 good link is better than 100 bad ones
So it is naturally just about getting as many links as possible without being critical of who is actually linking to your website, right? NO!
The more relevant a link is, the more value it creates for the page it links to. Conversely, a link that is not very relevant is disregarded and does not create much value for the website. That is why 1 good link is far more valuable to your website than 100 weak and irrelevant links.
But which factors determine whether a link is good or irrelevant? There are 3 factors at play—relevance, credibility, and popularity.
A single link from pages that are either very credible and popular in Google’s eyes—such as major news outlets—or pages that are highly relevant to your content will therefore be far more valuable than 100 links from pages that have nothing to do with your content and that nobody clicks on.
If you want to learn more about how to acquire links for your website, read more here, or take a look at our list of links.
If you need further inspiration, you can read here how we work with link building.
