Link Building Spain

Link Building in Spain: What Is It and Why Should You Do It?

Link building is one of the foundations of search engine optimization. While search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to provide their users with the most relevant results, the requirement for high-quality links has remained unchanged over the decades. If you want to build a healthy SEO campaign, you will need to understand what link building is and why you should implement it.

Basics of Spanish Link Building

Link building is generating a library of links on other websites that point back to your website. When search engines crawl the internet to build their search results, they look at the links between individual pages on your website and between other websites and your site.

While most search engine optimizers agree that building a portfolio of high-quality links is important, they also agree that it is difficult. Waiting for these links to develop organically can take years—decades even. You can pay low quality sites to slap your link onto one of their pages, but if their relevance to your website’s content is low or their own search engine ranking is low, you risk seeing your ranking plummet.

Understanding Hyperlinks

To understand why you need to build links, you will need to understand how links are built and how web crawlers read and interpret links. A link is comprised of four sections: the start tag, the link referral (the URL), the link’s text, and the end tag.

1. Start tag – In HTML, this is an anchor. You’ll see it denoted with an “a.” When a search engine scans a site, this is the tag it uses to identify a link.
2. Referral – The next piece of HTML you’ll see is “href.” This is short for hyperlink referral and is paired with the URL you want to direct to.
3. Link text – This is the piece of text that website viewers will actually see when they are on the page and can click on to follow the link.
4. End tag – This closes the link.

Why Search Engines Care about Links

Links are one of many factors search engines use to determine the relevance and quality of a particular page they are indexing. While relevant content and keywords will always be vitally important to a page ranking, the number of external links that point back to a particular website shows a web crawler that that site is likely to be filled with good content that other people found relevant and high quality enough to list as a resource.

In the past, you could simply submit your website to a directory and get a high-quality link in return. Google now discourages this practice and will actually penalize a website that shows up in an online directory. Luckily, there are still plenty of legitimate link-building tactics that an optimizer can use to boost page ranking.

There has been speculation that updates to Google’s algorithm have downgraded the importance of links, in favor of social signals (specifically to encourage the use of Google+). The shuttering of Google+ and the shrinking user base of traditional social media over the last three years, however, causes many optimizers to speculate that links are again the most important factor web crawlers consider in page rankings.

Nofollow Links

Not every link is created equally. If you look at the code behind a link, you might see a “nofollow” tag included in the HTML. This tag is a signal to web crawlers to ignore that link. This tag is commonly used on websites where users can post links (i.e. in a forum, or in blog comments), to prevent the hosting website from having to moderate those links.

Posting your link on a website that uses nofollow tags in its links will not improve your page ranking. Here are some of the most common places nofollow links are implemented:

• Signatures of blog guest posts
• Wikis
• The Yahoo! Answers service
• Comments on blog posts
• Forums (including Reddit, until the post receives a terminal number of upvotes)
• Guestbook posts

Most web crawlers also prefer links included in any kind of paid advertising are tagged as nofollow, as this prevents your organic search ranking from being influenced by paid advertising. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t link to your website in your paid advertising campaigns, as monthly visits and time on site are still important factors to both the success of your business and the success of your search engine optimization campaign.

Other Benefits of Link Building

First and foremost, the biggest benefit of building a library of high-quality backlinks is an improved search results ranking. But this isn’t the only benefit of link building. Here are some of the other reasons to make this a part of your SEO efforts:

1. Creating and improving relationships – In order to convince another website or blog to include a link to your website on their website, you have to reach out to them, usually with a piece of useful content that will benefit their website. This engenders good will and can help you start and build on relationships with other people in your industry, including real influencers, who will advocate and evangelize for your business.
2. Building your brand – The right kind of link building will help you establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
3. Bringing in referral traffic – When you have a link on a relevant and respected website, you are much more likely to see people actually clicking on that link, visiting your website, and even making a purchase of a product or service.

Earning Links

While we usually use the term “building” when we discuss links in an SEO context, it’s important to remember that you need to earn your backlinks. That means genuinely having something worth linking back to, like a piece of research, an interesting graphic, a blog post, or a tool. When you have something valuable to share, building links is easy and extremely valuable for all parties involved!

Do you want to learn more? Then have a look at our full link building for SEO guide for free!