Because many non-web professionals do not understand how the complex network of computers called the Internet works, they fail to see the importance of link building to the success of their website. The truth is that link building is not optional to the success of a website.
The black art of obtaining traffic from search engines in often called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO activities are aimed at two sets of factors:
- On-page factors
- Off-page factors
On-page factors are those that can be easily adjusted by the webmaster or content editor of the website. When the web first started, these were the factors that were primarily used by the search engines to rank webpages. They include the visible text of the page, the page title that shows in the browser, and those enigmatic "meta tags."
On-page factors are still very important, but not as singularly important as they once were. Google revolutionalized the use of off-page factors to determine the importance of webpages with its PageRank formula. In a nutshell, Google assigns a PageRank to each webpage in it's index, based on how many other pages are linked to that webpage. Each incoming link is seen as a "vote" for the webpage that the link is pointing at. It also takes into account the PageRank of the linking pages, and the number of outgoing links on the linking pages. This means that the most valuable links you can get are links from high PageRank pages, where your link is one of only a few on that page. Links from low PageRank pages are of lesser value, as are links from higher PageRank pages with many outgoing links.
The activity of obtaining these valuable incoming links is called Link Building. Link building can be time-consuming, difficult, and is a long term investment whose effects may not be immediately apparent. Once the site is mature, assuming that it is a quality site, it will gain incoming links naturally, as other sites link to its useful and interesting information. At the beginning however, it is critical that a link building program be budgeted and properly executed, otherwise, no one will ever find out about the website, and it will fail to meet its business goals.