Resident Funk Blog

There are many elements that go into search engine optimization and getting your site ranked. One of the fundamental steps is link building.

To understand link building, we need to step back in time a bit. Our story begins in the 1990s at Stanford. There, two young men met during a campus visit and started playing around with different ideas. A few years later, they started a search engine called BackRub.

BackRub was based on the idea that search engines could produce results that actually made sense for the people using them. It sounds obvious, but it was a revolutionary concept at the time. Regardless, this would be done by classifying some sites as more relevant than others. How so? Well, the two gents figured out that really good sites would be evidenced by the fact that other sites included links to them.

A classic example is the website of the IRS. Don’t cringe. It is actually a good site. It also appears high in the rankings for any tax search imaginable. Obviously, the IRS doesn’t pursue SEO, so why does the site rank high? The answer is because there are so many links pointing to it. There are millions of sites that have links pointing to the IRS site so people can get forms, read up on tax issues and so on. With so many links, BackRub interpreted the site as being extremely relevant on tax issues and ranked it highly across the board on tax issues.

This idea of using link counts to determine the relevancy of a site for ranking purposes was ground breaking. In fact, it made the two gents who came up with it extremely rich. Never heard of BackRub? Oh, they changed the name a few years ago. It is now called Google.

If you want your site to rank highly, the number of links pointing to it from other sites will be a factor. Every SEO company has a strategy for building them. Some trade links with other sites. Some publish articles. The method doesn’t so much matter as the fact it has to be done.

Aazdak Alisimo writes search engine optimization tips for SEOServiceCompanies.com.