Link Building

Link building is the work of getting other websites to put a link to yours. Search engines began by counting links. A link from one site to another was read as a vote, and a page with votes from places people trust was pushed up the list. The idea is older now and much quieter, but it still decides a lot.

Not every vote weighs the same. A link from a university, a national newspaper or a well-known trade body counts far more than a link from a directory nobody reads. Where the link sits matters too. A line inside an article is worth more than a name in a footer that appears on every page of a site. Relevance matters as well. A bakery linked from a food magazine makes sense. The same bakery linked from a car parts site does not.

This is where money arrives and the trouble starts. Packages offering two hundred links for a small monthly fee are everywhere. What you actually buy is the same handful of empty sites selling to everyone, often built on expired domains or on real sites that were broken into without the owner ever knowing. Those links get ignored at best. At worst your own site becomes one of the hosts and quietly carries pages you never wrote, which is a break-in first and a ranking problem second, and a reason to start with a security review rather than a link report.

The safe routes are slower and duller. Publish a number nobody else has, such as your own price survey or what forty of your customers actually asked for. Ask suppliers and partners to list you, because that link is real and the relationship behind it is real. Local press will cover a new branch, a new hire or a donation. Trade associations list their members. Linkysoft earns most of its links this way, and the digital marketing team would rather have six of them than six hundred bought ones.

One test before you pay anyone. Ask for three links they built last year and open them. If the pages read like nothing a person would sit down and write, walk away. Check what the links point at as well, because a strong link aimed at a page that takes eight seconds to load is money burned, so the site build comes first. Linkysoft puts that order in writing before any link work starts.