Links & Creating Referrals

Link Building is an exercise to influence the search engine rankings. A link points to owner's website from a given source also known as inbound links they were created for sole purpose of ranking higher on the SERPs. 

How Come? 

Well during the early evolution period the algorithms judged websites from the number of inbound or external links pointing to them. This enabled the search engines to rate them higher and rank them high as well. Although other factors did count links were primary signals which search engines respected. This is how their indexing and ranking programs were shaped. 

Not so anymore random link building does not result in appreciable climb upwards. But if you have authoritative or natural inks they still count and can rank your website higher. Links tell a lot about the site to the ranking algorithms. They remain as core of the algorithms even today. However random link building from non authoritative sources can lead to a penalty.     

But then links are not built for the purpose as highlighted above. No follow links are as useful if built rightly with topic relevancy on authoritative sight. Hence a large number of links should be built using the "nofollow" sites. I am sure this will not lead to a penalty. The links also act as referrals leading to the website. This activity should always be in the SEO Campaigns. The principal is simply high referral traffic from topic relevant source can lead to higher enquiries and hence higher conversions.   

Just be careful if links are built on spammy, ill reputed sites the website could be penalised. Hence be careful the best is to create a master website or blog with unique contents to attract natural links. Search engines respect natural links and can lead to upgrading the domain authority very quickly.