link building strategies link building is the practice of getting other sites to link back to your website this can often be done using a wide variety of strategies such as asking for a link giving away content or tools widget development social media campaigns purchasing links and more but first let s start with the basic theories why link building matters whenever any user enters a query into a search engine the search engine needs to determine how to return the best results how there are two key steps figure out which pages on the web are related in any way to the query evaluate which of the pages that relate to the query are the most important each link to a web page is seen as a vote for that web page in simple terms if there are two pages that are equally relevant to a given search query the page with the better inbound link profile will rank higher than the other page being all other factors equal hence the need of link building how search engines evaluate links each link to a web page is a vote for that web page that implies the higher the pr the more the value of that vote this is partially true but two votes may not have equal weight even if they are from same pr page value of vote depends on relevance and authority now let s take a deeper look at these factors relevance factor theme of the linking website purpose of the linking website topic of the linking page