Link Building

The primary purpose of link building is to gain both a quantity and quality of relevant incoming links (also known as inbound links) pointing to your site. A secondary benefit of link building is as an online marketing promotion tactic, to encourage visitors on an external website to click on a link to your website.
 

Broadly speaking, Google uses the number and relevancy of backlinks pointing to your website as a key indication of its relevancy to a particular set of keyword terms.
 

For example, if your website has topical content relating to ‘rugby tackling tips’ then visitors on the world wide web will find it, talk about it in blogs, buzz about it on social media sites, and ultimately link back to the content on your website. Google uses this linking popularity system as a primary determinant of a website’s potential to rank for a particular set of terms, such as the term ‘best rugby tackling tips’.
 

There are other factors that will determine if the ‘rugby tackling tips’ content ranks well in the search engines, such as the quality of your on-page optimisation and if there are issues preventing your website content from being indexed by the search engines.
 

Consulting with a search engine marketing specialist when implementing a link building programme is crucial to the success of your programme. You should also refer to Google Quality Guidelines on link building. These guidelines outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to your site being completely removed from the Google index, or otherwise penalized. If your site is penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
 

In order to run a profitable SEO programme, you will need to understand the differences between ‘black’ and ‘white’ hat search engine marketing.
 

‘White hat’ search engine marketing focuses on creating content for users, and then making that content easily accessible to the search engine spiders, rather than attempting to manipulate the search engine algorithms.
 

‘Black hat’ search engine marketing attempts to improve rankings in ways that involve deception, such as using link farms and buying high value links from websites.
 

Clickthrough employs ‘white hat’ search engine marketing techniques, such as writing unique and SEO optimised articles and content that encourage relevant backlinks and postings to pertinent blogs and forums.