Link building is a critical part of building and growing a business website.  If you are unfamiliar with link building, it’s the process of getting other websites to link back to your own site.

These websites may link to you voluntarily or you can specifically ask them for links.  Additionally, you can build links on your own by utilizing web 2.0 entities like social networking sites (Facebook, and YouTube), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon), and user-generated publishing sites (HubPages, Squidoo, InfoBarrel, Wizzley).

Backlinks are very important because these are among the factors that search engines like Google look into when determining how a certain site should rank in their listings.

Reason #1 – Higher SEO Ranks

It boosts your rankings on the search engines.  The top search engines count the number of backlinks that point to your website and use them to determine how they are going to rank your website.

Generally, your website has more chances of ranking high if it gets more backlinks.  Backlinks are however not the same when it comes to quality.  You have to see to it that the sites linking to you aren’t link farms or spam sites.

Reason #2 – Drives More Traffic

A single link to your site from a high-traffic website can bring in hundreds if not thousands of instant traffic.  If you have taken the proper steps to make your content SEO friendly, then the majority of your traffic will be relevant.  Granted, you will need to have a system in place to process leads, but the first step is to get targeted traffic into the pipeline through link building.

This traffic may slow down in the following days but your business will have had a chance to win new readers and customers.

Reason #3 – Helps Gain More Readers 

Link expose your business in more platforms.  Getting a link from, say Blogger or WordPress, exposes your website to users of these popular blogging platforms.  This equates to more readers and customers as well.

The more readers you have, the more you can drive them to your blog and if you have quality content, they will visit often.

The time Link building takes depends on how effective you are.  You will want to spend time landing some really good natural links.  You should try to consistently gain high quality backlinks from extremely related sources.

To actually become effective on gaining some more authority and thus higher ranking, you can expect at least 3 months time.  If you’re just beginning with the link building process it can be extremely tempting to select options which enable you to build as many links as you can in the shortest amount of time possible.

Don’t agree to link building schemes or working with link building farms as link quality is typically compromised. Remember, to be useful and productive for your website, links must be from a relevant, high quality and well-ranked site.

Put research and efforts into your link building so that possible linking opportunities can be identified and pursued.

If a low quality site wants to link to you from a page with 300 links on it then you can basically assume the strength of the link is shared by, 300 others!

Reason #5 – It Can Be Free

It’s free most of the time.  Yes, you can resort to buying links but you can get the same links for free if you are creative enough.  You should only buy links if you don’t have the time to build the links yourself.

Reason #6 – Ongoing ROI

The links you build will continue to benefit you in the months and even years to come.  Unlike other strategies that bring you instant results but fade away in time, link building will benefit you as long as the links you built remain intact.

Reason #7 – Your Site Can Be Amongst Good Company

Link building drives targeted traffic. This is especially true if you target sites that have content which are related to yours.  Provided you try and get links from the neighborhoods at the top of Google, for your key phrases, Google will show its thanks by way of ranking those sites!

Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from.  Network and stay involved. Don’t worry about “theme” of websites linking to you though – as its importance is unproven but it is good for traffic!

Reason #8 – Makes Your Brand Identifiable

It helps in building your business brand.  The more you get your link out there, the more people will be able to identify with it.  This makes your website easily recognizable and this usually leads to a boost in your brand.

As stated earlier, search engines like Google count the links pointing to your website.  The more links they count, the more they’ll love and rank you.  Keep the quality over quantity rule in mind, however.

If you’re asked by someone to link to your site, you should accept, but don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (may negate the value of the link ) because you could see your site lose trust.  Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ‘shady’ backlink profile.

A safe bet is to link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.

Reason #10 – Helps You Keep a Competitive Edge

Link building keeps you ahead of your competition and helps you gain an edge over your competitors who don’t pay much attention to link building.  See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (you can ask to have those links replaced with yours!!!)

If you type “link:yourcompetitors.com” into Yahoo you can see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer – making it a top seo tool.

Link building is a mandatory when it comes to growing traffic for a website.  It’s a strategy you should be constantly implementing to gain qualified leads.