Search Engine Optimization Strategies: Link Building

November is right around the corner, and you know what that means... It’s time to vote! Now, you may or not be excited for the 2012 presidential election, but you can learn something about SEO from the media in the upcoming weeks. First, let’s take a look back to 2008. Do you remember when Oprah Winfrey endorsed President Obama? We do. Oprah was named “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN and Time.com, and her authoritative endorsement influenced thousands of women voters. You may be thinking, “How does this apply to SEO and link building?”

Links to your site are votes for your site, ensuring users a trusted way to view relevant information from sites with high authority. Without them, search engine spiders wouldn’t be able to get from one place to another. Link building is the process of accumulating links that are pointed to your website. They’re also a great way to share something people agree with or endorse. Just think if Oprah tweeted about your company and posted a link to your website. That’s 13M people influenced and a lot of authority to back it up!

Link building is always the most challenging part of a search engine optimizers job; but also the one most critical to success. Here’s how Google weighs link related components in their algorithm:

Trust authority of the host domain - 24%

Link popularity of the specific page - 22%

Anchor text of external links to the page - 20%

As you can see, links encompass over 66% of Google’s ranking algorithm, making them the most important part of search engine optimization. Inbound links from a site like USAToday.com has a much higher authority than an inbound link from ComedyCentral.com, ultimately telling the Internet that your website must be pretty dang important.