What is Link Marketing?

In a nutshell, link marketing is the process of creating links to and from your website to other websites. The biggest question is why does link marketing work and why is it important. To understand this, we need to take a step back in time to when the internet was conceived and built back in the 1960's. (NO..Al Gore did not invent the internet)

The internet was originally conceived and built as a communications tool to share and exchange information. Although it was built with a military purpose in mind, the earliest use of the internet was by scientists who used it to exchange ideas, articles and theories.This free flow of information and ideas was contradictory to the thinking of the time which was that information was to be kept secret. Sharing of information was well..how do you say it...communist. Scientists are not capitalists however, and so the internet and the concept of sharing information and exchanging ideas flourished.

Now turn your clocks forward to the late 1990's and the explosive growth of the internet. This growth was due mainly to advances in technology which now allowed information to be transferred between computers and stored on those computers at speeds unthinkable only a decade earlier. Throughout this growth however, the fundamental belief that had allowed the internet to survive and grow still prevailed during this explosive growth. Information should be shared and should be FREE.

As a result, as people and companies built websites, they decided that instead of creating and providing all of the information to their users, they provided only the information in which they had expertise. Then they LINKED to other related sites which would be either of interest to their users or was a direct extension of the information they were providing. This was how linking got started. Its' true importance was not revealed however until a search engine named GOOGLE was established in 1998. With over a million new web pages being published to the web every day, people needed a way to find the information they were looking for. Up until then, there were search engines but the relevancy of the search results were weak because the search engines methods of delivering results had been undermined by web developers trying to generate traffic to their websites.

Google changed all that. They looked at the fundamental philosophy of the internet and realized that if they looked to see how many sites linked to a particular site, then that is a good indication of how popular that site is viewed by consumers who already know about it. Google then concluded that websites with multiple links to them should be ranked high in the search results of phrases associated to the information provided by the website. This way people looking for information on this topic can find the website.

So why does link marketing work? More Links to your website = Higher ranking in search engine search results.

Now this is not the only criteria necessary to rank high in the search engine, but it is one of the most important criteria. Other criteria include optimizing the website (see search engine optimization article), depth of the website, quality of links to the site, strength of links to the site in addition to over 60 other criteria. Today, link marketing is the most established method of driving traffic to your website. In addition, there are multiple methods to implement this strategy depending on your time, needs and goals.