Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to yours. Often, link building is done for SEO purposes: The sites that link to you are one of the biggest signals that Google uses to determine how a site/page will rank for keyword searches.

A backlink on a website is a link from someone else's website that points to your site. If Site A has a link on one of their pages that goes to Site B, then Site B could say that they have a backlink from Site A.

A backlink in SEO is a powerful part of a site's Google rankings. Webmasters will often work to build good backlinks as well as analyze their backlinks to find ones that could hurt their site.

A link building campaign is an effort to get other sites to link to a targeted site to help it rank higher in Google. However, while some tactics can help your site, artificial techniques can often get a website penalized.

Google would prefer that your link building be natural: Create good content and people will want to link to it. A sizable number of SEOs use tactics that are against Google's guidelines, which can bring quick results but attract penalties that can leave a site worse off in the end.

As Google started to dominate the world of search engines and everyone found out that who links to you matters, then link building services started popping up, including ours, founded in 1999 by Jim Boykin. Back then, it was more of a Wild West, and a lot of things that SEOs did then are known to be bad now. We have evolved; many other firms have not.

Backlinks are one of the most important aspects when it comes to SEO. You need your site to be more trusted than your competitors' sites in order to rank higher in Google. Other important ranking factors include having great content and a great user experience: If you lack on those, having great backlinks won't matter.

Getting other great sites to link to you is very important if you are doing SEO. But earning links by having good content people want to link to is better than artificial link building tactics, which can get you penalized by Google.

Link building has changed, but it's not dead. Many SEOs have moved their link building efforts toward creating great content, then marketing that content in the hopes of earning links. The link building techniques of the past are dead, but it has evolved into marketing great content today.

Having good backlinks shows Google that your site is a trusted authority worth linking to. If you want to rank higher for phrases that are relevant to your site, doing things to get other sites to link to you should be a very important goal.

If you just wait for people to find your content in the hopes that people will link to it, you may be waiting a long time. If you can create great content and linkable assets that are worth linking to, then promote that content so more people see it, your chances of getting links is much higher.

How you do link building should be largely the same whether you run a small business or have a large e-commerce site. The goal should be to make your pages and your site better than anyone else's, then market your content to earn links: You need good pages first, with content that deserves those backlinks.

Manual link building is something done by hand rather than by automated processes. Automated link building is considered "black hat" by Google. Manual link building can still use shady tactics, though, so "manual" doesn't automatically mean "good." If you can earn backlinks with good content, that is better.

White-hat link building obtains backlinks using methods that are within Google's guidelines. Black-hat link building, on the other hand, builds backlinks that are artificial and against these guidelines. White-hat link building is what everyone wants and many claim to offer, but it is rarely seen.

If you're trying to get links from directory submission sites, stop; 99% of these directories are spam, and Google knows that. Unless you know 100% for sure that a site that has a directory is trustworthy and not penalized by Google, you should not submit your pages to these sites.

Another link building shortcut is to buy an expired domain with links pointing to it and use those links to your advantage. But unless you have a site that you're willing to burn, using expired domains to get backlinks is not advisable. If you're searching for this service, you can easily find some that offer it, but it's risky.

Getting citations in social media has little, if any, direct impact on how Google ranks pages in their index. Most SEOs who use social media are hoping to promote their great content in the hopes that others will see it, and write about it elsewhere, so that the site obtains earned backlinks.

Nothing beats natural links for earning trust or power in the eyes of Google. If you can create great things for your site that are worthy of being cited by other people and websites, that's a white-hat approach.

There are a few methods of getting backlinks, but most are black-hat. The advice that we would give is to create great content that can earn backlinks from other sites. Anything you do to get backlinks that is artificial is not recommended.

Depending on who you ask, the process will be different. At IMN, we will analyze your current site to see what is "linkable," and we will recommend many more things you can add to make your site more linkable. Then, we will promote the content that is worthy of links.

You start by building great content that people will want to link to. Then, either hire someone who has a great reputation or become an expert yourself. Don't try to hire someone to do this unless you're 100% confident about their skills: Many SEOs could get your site penalized for doing this wrong.

The words that other sites use to link to your site are very important for ranking high in the search results for these words. Google and Bing use the words that other sites use to link to you as major indicators of what your page is about. But if you try to get links that use certain keywords to link to you, you're probably doing something that could get you penalized.

A great place to find linking opportunities is to study your competitors' backlinks to see who's linking to them. Also, you can look for content that the competitors have that appears to be valuable, then create that type of content for your site, ideally making yours better than theirs.

Unless you're an expert in SEO, I wouldn't try to manage this process. Hire Internet Marketing Ninjas and we can handle it for you: We've been doing this since 1999. If you don't want the stress of managing a link building campaign yourself, we're here to help.

Most of the common strategies for obtaining backlinks are cheap and unsafe. The best-case scenario is that Google won't count those links; the worst-case scenario is that Google will penalize your site. In order to earn trusted, high-quality backlinks, you need a great content strategy, one that can earn natural backlinks.

• Create great content that is worthy of someone linking to you.
• Promote that content.
• Build linkable assets that are awesome.
• Promote those assets.
• Don't stop writing and publishing great things.
• Become an industry expert.
• Keep creating and promoting killer content.

Often, when people have created content that they feel others could benefit from, they will email those people to ask them to link to their site. This can be a workable approach, but more often that not, this is done in an automatic way and in bulk, which just makes you look like a spammer.

Some of the most popular link building outreach methods are automated ones, since they're quick and cheap. But anything done in bulk or via a tool, where the person writing the outreach email hasn't even see the website they're writing to, would be considered spam. You can also do this process manually, with real, thoughtful humans, which is a much better approach.

"Content marketing" is a more acceptable phrase in the SEO industry because these days, good SEOs will be promoting content instead of doing the formerly common service of "link building," which can easily be done badly and get your site in trouble. Both approaches have similar end goals, but they use different tactics to reach those goals.

There is no software that we recommend for link building.

At Ninjas, we help clients to create great content that is link-worthy, then work to promote that content to people and places that could benefit from it. With our white-hat approach, we can earn good links for your site.

We do not offer "typical" link building packages: We customize our content marketing efforts for your site. At Ninjas, we believe that each client deserves better than a cookie-cutter approach. Your company isn't merely "typical," and your link building package shouldn't be, either.

Our link building services start at $7,500 per month, including consulting and linkable content development as well as marketing. You can certainly find link building prices that are lower than ours, but in this area, cheaper is not better: Cut-rate services are likely to hurt your site in the end. We believe that the quality of our link building is well worth the price.

Our manual link building approach relies on creating link-worthy content and marketing it to trustworthy sites. At Ninjas, our methods help our clients get results and stay safe from penalties.

Broken link building is a service that Ninjas uses a very small percent of the time. This service usually includes finding pages that no longer exist on the Internet, creating similar content to what used to be on that page, publishing that new content on your site, and then emailing those who link to the broken page to let them know that they can fix that broken link by linking to your page instead.

It's simple to hire the best link building service: just contact Internet Marketing Ninjas. We do high-quality, white-hat work that can help your site rank better in Google and avoid being penalized or hurt by a Google update.