The role of link building in SEO

Page links have always been a critical ranking factor for search engines. In the web crawler’s perspective, links form the path between pages; therefore, links give a notion of a page’s popularity and authenticity. Although SEO is not all about link building, link-based factors are an important part of most search engine algorithms.

Google has made several updates to its page ranking algorithms in the past couple of years, one of which specifically targets link building. When Google updates its search engine algorithm, so should your link building strategy.In 2014, that would be your biggest SEO challenge.

Search engine ranking is expected to give preference to those sites with backlinks from social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Pages that get retweeted or shared frequently mean that their content is useful, popular, and relevant, so readers would want to share them on their own websites as well.

There’s the argument that, to respond to Google’s Penguin update’s scrutiny, one should avoid link building. According to Mat Cutts from Google, this is not correct:

“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is), and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

SEO experts have recommended two methods for effective link building:

• Build links to pages with relevant content where the users will have a genuine interest.
• Quality should be given priority over quantity. That means a few links from highly trusted and popular websites will give you more search visibility than a lot of links from low-quality websites.

Tiered link building will continue to dominate page ranking in 2014, unless Google makes a whole new change to its ranking algorithms. Following are some general mistakes SEO marketers make in tiered link building, and it’s best to avoid them to make your link building successful.

• Poorly spun content
• improperly maintained target site list.
• Instead of focusing only on tiered link building, it’s recommended by SEO experts that tiered link building should be practised in conjunction with other link building practices.

This is a small overview of how important link building is in 2014 in order to get your website ranked higher in Google SERPs and any other search engines. It would be a real challenge for SEO marketers to implement strategies for effective link building for their websites.