Within the effort to increase the popularity of a website in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) link building is one of the most important factors.¹⁾ Amount and quality of backlinks are an indicator for the popularity of a website. The more backlinks of good quality point to a website the better the page rank and the better the position (visibility) of a website in the search result engine will be. In the nature of the search engines links are seen as recommendations. As a part of the Off-Page SEO these recommendations are essential for a successful SEO-strategy.

The challenge of link building is to find the right balance between quantity and quality of backlinks. It’s unrewarding trying to get a huge amount of backlinks without considering the quality. “Getting a few of the right links, from the right places can be more valuable than getting 100 links from the wrong places.“²⁾ The quality of links are determined by different factors³⁾ , e.g.:

• Authority/trust of the linking webpage: Search engines especially google rank websites to segregate useful pages from spam (TrustRank).
• Context: The link has to be relevant to the content of the page where it exists.
• Popularity: Links from popular sites matter more to search engines.
• Neighborhood: Links from Websites known as linkfarms are not received well by search engines.
• Link anchor: The link-text should describe the content of the target-site in a few words
• Nature of the link: The link has to be written in html (not for example in javascript) so that it is visible for the search engine crawler.

To have substantial inbound links it’s necessary to create a sensible link building strategy.

• Natural link building: First of all good content creates links by itself. Attractive content will be recommended and therefore linked.⁴⁾

There are different ways to obtain links via active link acquisition:

• Social media strategy: Engaging users on Social Media sites like forums, Facebook, Twitter etc.. These sites or example allow to link to the own site in the personal profil.
• Directories: Sites like Yahoo!Directory or DMOZ are effective platforms to obtain links.
• Blogging: User generated content often has a high relevance for search engines. To use this fact, blog-posting is another helpful way to generate backlinks. As well as blog-commenting.
• Purchasing backlinks: Assumed the business case contains budget links can be bought. Several web sites are based on such business models.

Link building as SEO as a whole isn’t a mathematic science where webmasters can sum up exactly different numbers to get a desired result. The rules are changing from time to time and the search engine operators try to avoid malpractice. But: A webmaster considering the main principles can be very successful in implementing an intelligent link building strategy. There are plenty of instruments to accomplish objectives. In the long term of course only compelling and relevant content induces backlinks.