If you want high organic search engine rankings, you need incoming links. It really is as simple as that. You can have the crappiest website in the world and still achieve high search engine rankings with enough (and the right type of) incoming links. Honestly, that’s how important they are.

I always say that 95% of the key to winning the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game relates to link building because… The more links you obtain… The better the quality of those links… The better structured those links are… The more diverse those links are (coming from multiple sources)… The longer those links are in place (the more they mature)... …the faster your search engine rankings will improve.

More importantly, the more stable they will become. It’s not much fun to see your website in the top 10 results for a specific keyword term only to see it gone tomorrow. Long term stable “free traffic” from the organic search engines comes from a well structured and executed link building campaign.

To understand why let’s take a very brief tour of the history of search engine optimization. Specifically we’ll look at the way in which search engines, Google in particular, have ranked websites in various ways over the years.

I also want to start here because this little story should help to highlight the fact that Google is really just a big dumb ass computer algorithm.  It is not some mythical beast that can’t be tamed.

There are not ten thousand third world technicians sitting there reviewing millions upon millions of websites. There really isn’t much too it at all and people tend to really over complicate things.

Sure, it has developed over time, calling it dumb ass doesn’t really do it justice, but at the end of the day all I’m saying is that if we know what Google wants, and we can provide what they want to see, we can manipulate things to our advantage.

Where It All Started…

Way back in the very late 90’s, search engines used to rank websites (more specifically individual pages) based largely on keyword density. The closer you managed to get your page to what the ideal keyword density was at the time, the better your rankings became.

If, for arguments sake, Google was looking for an average keyword density of 4.5%, then you simply needed to get your page as close to that as possible for the keyword term you were trying to target.

Webmasters quickly learned that all they needed to do to manipulate their search engine rankings was to change the keyword density of their pages.

As an example, they could simply increase (or decrease) the amount of times the term “dog training advice” appeared in their pages to improve it’s relative importance, and therefore ranking in Google.

Those sure were the days. However this presented a major problem.

It put the control and influence of search engine results in the hands of webmasters.

The more webmasters that realized this, the more the search engine results became filled with poor quality and “less relevant” search results.

As the knowledge spread it also saw the emergence of the highly aggressive “blackhat” search engine spammers and large scale (almost industrial scale) spamming and search engine manipulation.

In its very earliest and simplest form it included “keyword stuffing”.

That was the practice of making the target keyword terms the same color as the background of a page, so the search engines could see them (and register the keyword density), but regular visitors didn’t.

There were also many other similar tricks that one could employ to artificially boost their importance. Many of these people also used software programs to create thousands upon thousands of pages of rubbish content, tweaked with the ideal keyword density in order to really game the system.

Aggressive search engine cloakers also showed up. This crowd presented one page of content to the search engines optimized to what the computer algorithm wanted to see – only to present an entirely different page to the search engine visitors.

Not a problem so long as things are targeted, but when your 10 year old sister starts looking for “Whiney The Poo” and ends up on a porn site, well, it’s not rocket since to see that something needs fixing there. So it didn’t take long before Google realized they needed more control.

Essentially Google was becoming devalued a service provider of accurate search results to visitors. Enter the importance of incoming links.

Around 2001 / 2002 Google started to place more importance on the value of incoming links as the primary “ranking factor”.

The very basic idea being that…

“If another website linked to yours, that webmaster obviously thought it was a valuable enough resource to recommend to their own website visitors.”

So there was an implied quality standard. Other webmasters (in general) were not going to link to crappy websites or content. Essentially every incoming link become a “vote” for the quality of your website, and those votes started to have more emphasis on where Google’s algorithm decided to rank your website.

Google “Page Rank” was born not long afterwards. I’m not going to get into a huge discussion about this right now except to say that during that time period it was the “big thing”. In very simple terms every website was issued a “Page Rank” value. The more websites that linked to yours the more “Page Rank” you received. The more of those websites that already had high Page Rank themselves (authority websites) – the more “Page Rank” was passed to you.

Things changed in the search engine optimization world almost overnight.

It basically became a game of getting as many incoming links, from as many high “page ranked valued” websites and pages as possible. If you were just after “Increased Page Rank” - it didn’t even matter what the content on those pages was about, or if it was in anyway related to your own websites content.

I remember investing $10,000 per month for incoming links on group of PR8 & PR7 valued websites back then and we managed to build a very solid PR8 website. Ego trip!

However, although there were certain advantages to having high Page Rank - high search engines rankings wasn’t just about getting higher “Page Rank”. This is an area and idea that confused many (and still does to this day).

If you’re wondering about Google Page Rank – I don’t really focus on it at all anymore. You shouldn’t pay too much attention to it either.

But, if you’re new to this whole link building and/or SEO idea, inevitably you’re going to come across someone in a discussion forum somewhere talking about Google Page rank and how important it is.

What was more important (and still is to this day) was how these incoming links linked to your website. This is best highlighted by the now infamous “Google Bombs”. For example, at one point in time if you searched on “Miserable Failure” in Google, the top result returned was the official website of George Bush. You can rest assured; George wasn’t sitting there tweaking the “meta tags” within his website to include that keyword term.

In fact, I highly  doubt the term “Miserable Failure” appeared within his website content anywhere.

What happened was that thousands of other websites started linking to George’s website using the exact term “Miserable Failure” as the “Anchor Text” of the hyperlinks.

Due to the nature of Google’s computer algorithm – and the importance it places on incoming links (and specifically the extremely large amount of weight they gave to “anchor text” at the time) - it started to recognize that this is what George’s website was related to.

Eventually it gained a #1 position for this term through linking alone. Pretty funny stuff really.

There are quite a few well known instances of this happening. Another one was a competition between people within the SEO industry to see who could rank for “coolest guy on the planet”.

If you want more examples, just go to Google and type in “Google Bomb” however this should show you how important incoming links were (and still very much are) as a primary search engine ranking factor.

At this same time you could also use a specific search syntax in Google to see exactly how many back links any given website had, and specifically where those links were.

Form an SEO perspective, it was dead easy to “reverse engineer” why the top ranking websites were ranking like they were. You could simply manipulate the keyword density of your content pages, and implement a similar link building campaign as close to the high ranking websites as possible.

Hey presto - although it did require work - top rankings would not be far away.

As you can imagine, with the introduction of the importance of incoming links, experienced webmasters we’re also able to “game” that to their advantage as well. The “Google Bomb” mentioned was a prime example of how this link ranking factor could be “gamed”.

However, placing more importance on incoming links as a primary ranking factor was the “lesser of two evils” in the way in which Google could rank websites.

It’s easy enough for any old webmaster to manipulate the internal components of their own websites (keyword density etc). They are in total control of them and aren’t responsible to anyone else.

It’s much harder (and takes more work) to get incoming (and valuable incoming) links from other websites. The individual webmasters of those websites are in control over whether they decide to link to you or not.

This is why incoming links are ALWAYS going to be a primary ranking factor for the foreseeable future.

Where We’re At Today… Interestingly enough – those two core concepts of having keyword relevant content, and a decent amount of incoming links hasn’t changed all that much.

Things have just been tweaked towards tight theming of BOTH of these key areas.

“theme relevancy” ... This is the most important concept that you need to understand in search engine optimization right now.

It relates not only to the internal components of your website itself, but also your link building efforts which is what we’re dedicating this entire book to. Basically…

1.     We want to structure our website around themed content.

2.     We then want to structure our link building efforts around that same theme …we do this by grouping “like content” into keyword specific content channels on our website. We then build “keyword relevant” text links to those content channels, from sites related to those same “themes”.

The truth is that there are probably around 200 individual factors that determine where a website ranks in Google. However, I was say around 95% of that relates to your incoming links. 4% of that relates to have good quality unique content on your well structured website. The other 1% makes up the rest of the equation (things like having “Heading” tags for titles in content, “Meta Tags”, etc).

What that means is that if you master that 95% factor - you don’t need to worry too much about the other 5% of the equation.

Although it certainly can’t hurt to have the correct “Heading” tags in your content, and good “Meta Tags”, and keyword rich “image descriptions” etc. in your websites pages (it’s just good SEO practice) – it’s actually not “essential”.

You can sit there tweaking all those little things until the cows come home, but that’s not what’s going to drive your search engine rankings higher. You’re much better off focusing 95% of your time optimizing your website for factors that are going to produce 95% of the results.

That of course is done by building more incoming links to your website. Sure Google MAY introduce additional components into their ranking algorithm in the future to change how they rank websites. They may change the influence certain factors currently have. But incoming links are always going to be a key component due to the nature of the internet itself.

If you want high organic search engine rankings, you need incoming links from a well structured and executed link building campaign.

As an aside – other than SEO improvements – focusing on link building as a primary marketing goal also has the benefit of generating direct traffic and visitors from sources other than search engines.

Just about every link building technique available (with the exception of a few of the more subtle ones we’ll be discussing) is going to get links to your website in front of “eyeballs”. Every single one of these links is a potential entry point to your website. One more place a potential visitor or customer can use to arrive at your website. It’s like your casting a giant spider web out there.

The bigger the spider’s web, and the more threads it has in it, the more flies it’s going to catch.

The bigger your linking structure is online, the more links you have pointing to your website, the more visitors you’re going to pull in directly to your website.