After you've worked on your first website for a while and realized that visitors do not magically arrive at your virtual doorstep, you begin to understand a little about traffic generation. One of the first things you will probably encounter is building links. Let's take examine what link building is and how it can help you in your online business.

What Is A link?

A link is used for connecting two web pages. Internal links connect pages inside a website for example a link placed in an article could connect to your home page or a category on the same website. If the links point to other pages within the site they are referred to as internal links.

And then there are external links that connect a page of one website to that of another. For instance, when I write an article and post it in an article directory, I connect my article page on the directory to a page on my own website through the link.

What Is Link Building?

Link building involves a process of putting links to your website on other sites. In other words it's a procedure for making more connections. This can be achieved by writing articles and submitting them to directories. Producing guest blog posts and adding a few links back to your site is another way to build quality links.

Other kinds of link building consist of directory submissions, blog commenting, forum participation, setting up various profile pages, social bookmarking, press release submissions and the likes. Entire courses are being taught and books have been authored about the art of building links.

Why Is Link Building Important For SEO?

Why do so many people devote countless hours to their link building initiatives? They do it since those connections that they generate among pages on the web are an excellent way to improve the incoming traffic to their websites.

An even more essential reason for building links is to get your site to rank well in the search engines and in this way obtain a great deal of free traffic to your site. This is the reason that link building is crucial for search engine optimization.

The anchor text or the text that you use to form the link is the second most important factor for ranking a page in the search engines. The title tag is the first. A mix of the title tags and the backlinks make up for 80% of a site’s rankings. Therefore you must make sure that you use the right titles and make sure that your backlinks contain anchor text with your keywords included so as to rank in the search engines for those terms. You'll need several backlinks if you are trying to rank for a competitive keyword however it is possible with some work.

Give it a shot and see. Find a long tail keyword and create a blog post to target it. Your keyword ought to be contained in the title tag and you should then build a few links to that page using your keyword in the anchor text. For long tail keywords much less links will be required to get on the first page of the search results.

We at MandLoys Online Marketing helped hundreds of businesses rank high in local search engine listings. If you'd like to rank high in Google Places as well then you should definitely check out the best link building services which gets you amazing, long term results!

This article was only the beginning of local search engine optimization, if you'd like to read more (a lot more actually) then please visit our website by clicking the following link: google maps marketing !

Author's Bio: 

Carmine is a news writer, documentarian and writes short novels in her freetime.