The Top 7 Benefits of Link Building

So what is the benefit of link building? There are many, but here are the top 7:

1. Link building increases search engine rankings
When a gradual and relevant Link building campaign is undertaken for your site, it increases your ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Naturally, the entire idea of increasing your search engine ranking is to increase relevant traffic to your site, which is the whole point.

Link building improves the search engine ranking of your web page if done in specific ways. Besides an improved search engine ranking, there are certain other benefits that your website derives from carrying out a link building campaign. They are outlined on more detail below.

2. Links build credibility with the search engines
In very simple terms, when the search engines see links to your site from reputable web sites, sometimes called authority sites, the credibility of your site increases. Each link to your site from quality sources is like a “vote” for your site in the eyes of the search engines. Once you receive enough “votes”, the importance of your site goes up and so do your rankings. This is sometimes referred to as link popularity.

3. Link building increases PageRank
PageRank is a numeric value from 1 to 10, that represents how important a page is on the web. PageRank is Google’s way to measure the importance of your web site as it relates to other sites. When you receive links to your site with high PageRank, some of that PageRank is passed from their site to yours. This goes with benefit number two above: site credibility.

This is some confusion on the Web about PageRank. Some people think that PageRank is solely responsible for how well your site does in the rankings. While it is one small component, it is much more important to receive links to your site from quality sources with specific targeted anchor text. There are plenty of high ranking sites in specific niches with low PageRank who use this method.

4. Links mean more referring traffic (more traffic to your website)
A side benefit of undertaking a link building program is naturally occurring referring traffic from the sites that link to yours. If you receive links from quality sources, the traffic from those sources can be valuable for your business.

5. Link building keeps you ahead of your competition
Link Building can be the secret weapon against your competition. When your competition and you have both done a good job with your onsite SEO, Link Building can be the boost that gets your site ranked above the competition. Everything being equal, Link Building can be the tie breaker. Unless your competition knows how to analyze what you did differently (which is unlikely unless they have help), there is no way for them to tell why you are doing so much better than they are.

6. Links tell search engines what your pages are about
Remember we talked about “anchor text” above? Well the anchor text sends clues to Google about your site’s topic. The more clues from various sources on the Internet, the better your site does in the search engine rankings for that specific phrase or topic.

7. Links give you better and faster search engine indexing
Having links to your site from trusted sources can get your pages indexed more quickly than if you were to submit your site directly to the search engines. Google crawls trusted web sites very frequently and follows the links on those sites. By making sure you’re there, you can accelerate the indexing process.