The original vision for the Internet search engine was to match what a user typed into a search box with the content on one or more websites. This was more than adequate at a time when there were perhaps a few hundred thousand websites and the total scope of the knowledge they contained was limited to a few hundred subjects. We need to understand the role of link building in SEO
Now, some 25 years after the introduction of the world wide web, there are quite a few more criteria to determine if a search is successful or not. The information being returned by a search engine can’t just match a few of the words in the search terms. Now it has to consider relevance and timeliness. Is the information considered reliable by other sites? If so, what sites, and for how long? Is there any other information on the site in question that might help determine the quality and relevance of this search result?
All of these questions are important to contextual link building, and their importance may increase or decrease relative to some kinds of searches and results depending on a wide variety of other factors like what is trending, what is in the news and whether or not there are few or many similar results.
When optimizing a page or a site for search, it is important to consider the fact that links from other places on the web directing traffic to that page or site are often of equal or greater importance than other factors. Here are some things to consider.
What Does a Link Building Mean?
At some point not long after search engines became big business, the importance of many links leading to one place was interpreted as a “vote” for the quality and relevance of the linked page or site. If a site had numerous inbound links, or links that were coming from other sites, it was interpreted as confidence those other sites believed they were referring traffic to a good resource.
Later, the relevance question was answered by interpreting how the information was being linked and by evaluating the quality of the linking site itself. If a popular financial blog, for example, were to link to financial advice, it was likely the site being linked was also a quality site and that the information on it was relevant to the linking site’s readers.
Search engines took that information and used it to determine both the relevance and quality of the linked page or site and used it to prepare lists of information matching certain search terms.
Optimizing
For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, contextual link building and the presence or absence of links to certain pages or sites can be a crucial factor in whether the optimized page or site shows up in certain search results. While it is always the case that a link from a trusted site can produce considerable traffic on its own, it is also true that important information is always going to be of interest to a search engine, thus the links from those trusted sites are going to be a key indicator as to the relevance and quality of the optimized page.
Getting links from other sites is sometimes an organic process, but it can be an active campaign of simply contacting other writers and webmasters and providing them quality material they can use to help their readers as well as yours.