Chapter 6. Link Building

We now turn to the true source of ranking power: link building. All of our efforts in content writing and on-page optimization will fail if we do not undertake link building. Let's begin with a simple definition: link building is simply the process of encouraging other webmasters to create hypertext links from their website to yours.

Remember the analogy: on-page optimization factors are akin to tuning and building a race car; link building is the fuel that makes the car go. Without on-page optimization, the car will run slowly. Without inbound links, the car will lack the power to move.

One of Google's many ground-breaking innovations was the employment of inbound links as a measurement of the relative value and popularity of a website. The idea was that popular sites were popular for a reason, and if Google returned popular pages in its search results, then it was generally returning the best results to a search query. Google applied the term...