Think about the last time you read an article online or visited a web page. Chances are, different portions of that website’s text were hyperlinked and led to other websites. These links are like bridges in the road map of the web, and they are a key aspect to how search engines find (or “crawl”) your website.

In order to improve your website’s ranking, it’s important to ensure that there are plenty of websites linking to yours. So what sort of activity can you perform in order to improve the number of websites linking to yours? These types of search engine optimization campaigns are called link building, and can do wonders for your website.

Link building boosts your search engine ranking

At its core, link building’s main goal is to boost your website’s search engine ranking. While it’s not the only factor in a search engine’s algorithm for displaying and ranking your website, links play a key role in where you show up in search engine results. Each link is scored based on a variety of factors, including:

• Number of links
• The trustworthiness of the linking website
• The linking website’s page rank

Quantity is an important part of your link building campaign. However, it’s important to make sure that other websites which link to your own website are high quality. If many of the web pages linking to yours are low-ranking websites themselves, or dummy websites designed just to link to other pages, it will ultimately hurt your ranking overall.

Having your website linked to from quality websites will ultimately help you much more in the long run. If a reputable web page links to yours, search engines will deem yours as trustworthy by association, helping boost your page rank. So, how do you find reputable websites to link to yours? Services like Link Graph can help you find high quality websites and even work to create content that positions your site positively.

Link-building yields organic traffic

With an increase in search engine ranking comes an increase in organic traffic. This is pivotal to the success of your website, as you want people to find you through their natural search engine queries and not just through paid search or display advertising. Link building supports these kinds of natural queries, in turn ensuring that your content actually gets seen on the web. The way link building helps is by targeting the keywords that you would otherwise pay for in a paid advertising campaign.

Creating content that targets these keywords allows you to begin to rank better for those keywords, by including a hyperlink to your website with those phrases as the anchor text. For example, if you own a footwear business in Hoboken, NJ and want to drive more traffic to your store’s website using a link building campaign, creating some content with the phrase “shoe stores in Hoboken, NJ” could help drive natural traffic to your website when people naturally search for that phrase in Google.

Since link building campaigns ultimately get you one step closer to being in the top results of people’s searches, they can have a major impact on your business. Whether you’re looking to flesh out an existing advertising campaign or are new to the world of search engine optimization, link building should definitely have a place in your website’s digital strategy.

If you’re unsure where to begin, reaching out to a company with experience in this field can give you a great head start. Many websites even offer some analysis on your webpage’s current metrics for free, making it easy for you to begin formulating the best path forward.