Link Building Explained: That a 10-Year-Old Can Understand

Even as important as link building is, the vast majority of business owners still have absolutely no idea why. Part of the reason is that is because marketing companies want to inflate their egos, and they complicate the explanation of everything. We put this video together because we want to explain links in a way that even a 10-year-old can understand.

By the time we’re done with this video, you should have a very clear understanding of what links are, why you need them, as well as actionable ideas on how to get them. This knowledge is power, and it’s exactly what we do to generate over ½ million leads a year.

Let’s start by answering the easy question. What is a link?

A link is simply a connection between the content of two different files. It is generally a clickable element on a webpage it takes you from that page to another webpage (either on your own website or a third-party website).

What you’re looking at above is a blog post on our website. If you were to click the blue words that read “google discover” you would be linked over from our website to Google. Ideally, this is why most people want. They want someone who owns a website to link from one of their pages over to your page. But what people do a terrible job of doing is explaining ‘why’? Why do you want links and why does it supposedly lead google to put you higher in the search results when you get them? And today I want to make sure you fully understand this in a way that a 10-year-old could get it.

To start out keeping this simple, you should think of a link as a ’vote of confidence’. That is exactly how Google says it, and we will explain why.

Let me give you an illustration that will help you connect the dots and understand this. Imagine that I recommend a restaurant called ‘the Porch on Long Creek’ to you. That gives you a little bit of confidence that this might be a good restaurant. So for sake of this discussion, the parallel to my recommending the restaurant would be by in the link on someone’s website that points to your webpage. Because I’m recommending this restaurant, there’s trust. But I’m just one person, so that’s not necessarily going to be enough to convince you.

Now imagine three people recommended this restaurant to you. You would quickly begin to have even more confidence that this may be our quality restaurant that you should try.

And lastly, imagine 465 people told you the porch was a great restaurant. There will be no doubt in your mind that this is a very good restaurant. It’s simple logic. The more people that recommend it to you, the more confident you will be that it is good. And, as a result the more likely you are going to be to refer it to other people as well. This is how Google views links. As votes of confidence.

So imagine I have a webpage on my blog writing about the ‘BEST golf shoes’. And my goal is for Google to see a lot of people recommending me (by way of links) so that Google will consider me a trusted and authoritative source about who sells the ‘best golf shoes’. Before I proceed, let me make sure I don’t send the wrong message. Before I would do anything, I would make absolutely certain that I’ve got really good content on this page that discusses golf shoes. I would be talking about the different types, the pros and cons, and even having pictures of golf shoes. If you don’t have good content, no one is ever going to link to you. So all of this discussion supposes that you already have good content for Google to look at.

Currently, there are about 28,000 pages on the World Wide Web that talk about “the best golf shoes”. In a split second google has to decide which of those 28,000 pages should appear at the top of the search results when someone googles ‘best golf shoes’. Without getting overly complicated in this lesson, I’ll just say that one of the most important factors Google uses to rank websites will be the number of links pointing to your website, and the quality of them. So let’s say I’ve got one webpage pointing to my article about golf shoes.

On the other hand, let’s say my competitor has an article on his website about “the best golf shoes” but he has a ton more links pointing to his article. Keeping in mind that a link is a vote of confidence. It’s a recommendation, just like our analogy with the restaurant. WHO DO YOU THINK GOOGLE IS GOING TO TRUST AS THE BEST RESULT TO HELP SOMEBODY WHO WAS LOOKING FOR THE BEST GOLF SHOES? WELL, GOOGLE IS GOING TO TRUST WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE TRUSTING. GOOGLE WILL RECOGNIZE all of your recommendations and weigh it against the number of votes/links pointing to your competitor’s webpage.

I want to avoid getting too confusing, Google also will be looking at the value of those links pointing to your website. So for example let’s say both you and your competitor have 100 links pointing to your website, the tiebreaker of who gets to rank the highest will most likely be the value of each link pointing to your website. Let me try to put it in simple terms.

Let’s say in this example you have only one link pointing to your website.

And let’s also assume that your competitor has one link. The next tier will be for Google to look at the value or trustworthiness of the ONE link pointing to each of your websites.

So now I want you to imagine that the link pointing to your website had 10 links pointing to their webpage where they had a link pointing to your website. Immediately we begin to realize that that one link pointing to your website has a lot of authority compared to the one link pointing to your competitor site. So more links equal more trust. So with that thought in mind, it is realistic that you can have 100 links pointing to your website, and your competitor could only have 10 links pointing to their website and still outrank you simply because the authority of each of those links was substantially greater than yours. This is why you should never be a sucker for all those cheap link schemes. There’s no shortage of people selling links for $10, but in the end, Google is really good at recognizing their low-quality spam and rarely gives them any authority. It would be like me recommending McDonald’s for fine dining. You could see right through me. And likewise, Google see through that kind of low-quality links.

Now, For the million-dollar question. How do I get links? I’m going to give you a couple of examples that are definitely difficult and time-consuming, and then I will give you examples that are very easily done and very effective. You can do the time-consuming want yourself, and it’ll save you a good amount of money. But if you take that route expect this to become your full-time job. Because it’s not a one-and-done type thing, I can promise you your competitors ranking on the top of Google are always building links, and if you don’t do that, you’re not going to out RANK THEM.

First, here are a few examples of the more difficult way, but free link-building ideas. This requires you to manually reach out to third parties and ask them to link to you.

If you know any friend or family that manages a website or blog, reach out and ask them if they will put a link on their website.

One of the first things you might do is reach out to anyone that you’re donating heavily to, and ask them for a link. You will find most people are more than willing to put a link on their website to those companies that are investing in them.

If you have written an article where you’re highlighting or recommending someone else’s product or service, then this is great BAIT to get them to link to you. For example, if I wrote an article talking about how awesome a certain bed and breakfast was, I would reach out to that company and let them know about the review I wrote. People love it when you brag about them, and as a result, they are very likely to link from their website to you so they can show off a little.

If you write really really informative and helpful content (like case studies) you will find it over time people will naturally link to it. For this reason, it’s a good idea to constantly be writing new content and publishing it on your website.

WRITE TESTIMONIALS! This of course assumes we’re not talking about a monster corporation where you could never reach the contact person. If there’s a product or service that you use, write an astounding testimonial about it, and then be sure and let them know. This is very similar to baited content. We could literally go on and on and on. There are so many ways to build links, but it will absolutely take time.  An example might be let’s say I am a real estate company, and we worked with the mortgage company that always got our customers approved for loans when others could not. I probably would write a blog post about mortgage loans and brag about how awesome this company has been for our clients. I can almost guarantee you the mortgage company would want to link on his website to show his visitors what we were saying about him.

THE EASY WAY

For those of you who do not have the time, or simply are not interested in making this your career (and that’s exactly what it would be) let’s move onto the easy way of building links.

You can hire AN SEO COMPANY TO do it for you. Digital marketing companies have the infrastructure already in place and they know all of the various techniques of building links. But again, this will not be a one-time thing. You have to constantly be building links. I can guarantee you anyone whose ranking on Google is continually working to impress Google with quality links.

If you feel like you have a decent understanding of the building, companies like ours offer some really cool tools that allow you to do it yourself, but without all of the manual outreach as explained in the hard method. Meaning you simply fill out an order form describing where you want the links pointed to, and we do the actual work. This is a very affordable solution, but because the margins are Lowe you cannot expect a lot of customer service. So you need to know what you’re doing. Let’s show you a couple of examples of how you can start doing this today.

If you were on our website, PeakMarketingService.com, there is a link in the top navigation bar that says DIY/ORDERS. When you click that you will find several options where you can purchase links. I’ll explain what some of those are and what they do, I should point out that you always want a diversity of links. Do not ever go with one solution. Your links must look natural to google.

Hands down, the most popular and most effective solution is guest posts because it is designed to help you get quality, authoritative links to your website so you can move closer to the #1 spot in Google searches!. And this would probably be the one you would use 75% of the time. What is the guest post? With a guest post, our team writes an article that is somehow related to your industry. In this article we will include a link points to the webpage of your choice. Our team will manually reach out to different people asking them to publish that content on their website. The benefit to them as they get free professionally written content. When they publish it to their blog post you then get the benefit of the link. How many of these links you need to rank on page one of Google varies based on your competition and how many links they built. So you may only need four or five links, or you may need 50. It all depends on the competition and what they have done.

Another popular product we offer is content syndication services. Basically each time you publish a new blog on your website, you can syndicate it. Content Syndication service is a great way to get your message seen on ABC, FOX, CBS, and NBC. Get your company message in front of thousands of readers today. Syndication gives you a direct line to thousands of new readers. Just submit your content and we’ll guarantee you get published on 300+ high authority news sites across the US.

And the third solution would be press releases. Use this service for crazy fast exposure, increasing sales potential, and building trust with your prospects. A press release is a company’s official statement distributed to members of the news media for the purpose of sharing information, an official statement, or making an announcement.

Take Away:

• Links = Votes/Trust/Referrals
• You Will Rank Competitive Terms in Google With Links
• You Can Build Links for Free
• You Can Hire an SEO Company
• You Can DIY

Hopefully, you now have a clear understanding as to why you need links to rank on Google. If you found this helpful, be sure to like and comment below.