Before learning about linkbuilding you must have some general knowledge of internet/website marketing and promotion. This includes a introduction to search engine optimization or(SEO).

Let us start by explaining the difference between promotion and marketing. Ordinarily the word "promotion" is everything that is done to help sell a product or service. So technically speaking "everything" includes presentation materials or tricks that a sales person uses during a television commercial or a sales call or even a news paper ad that trys to get a person to think favorably about what is being advertised. The word advertising technically means the physical or virtual "print" or "space" that is a news paper or magazine ad, internet advertising, radio and tv commercials, direct mail or email and other direct response activities. Advertising also includes catalogs and billboards, as well as publicity and public relations. The word "promotion" takes care of all the loose ends. So you can see why often these words are used interchangeably, and can often be used to describe the same thing. We will get back to this a bit later.

Now a introduction to Search Engine Optimization. Generally speaking this term is used to describe any trick or technique applied to a website in order for it to achieve a high placement or "ranking" in the search engine results. In the world of websites there is really only 3 search engines you need to worry about. They are, Google, Yahoo and MSN. These 3 search engines account for 95% of searches on the net. Back to achieving those "high rankings". A high ranking is basically having a page or multiple pages of a website displayed as one of the top 10 or 20 pages for a specific search phrase. There is more than 1 billion searches a day on google alone. Probably 2 1/2 billion if you count all 3 search engines. 2 and 1/2 BILLION! You can assume that there are certain words that are being searched for more than others. SEO allows a website to rank better than other sites for a certain phrase. If a word is searched 350 million times a month and your website shows on the first page in the search engines for that phrase, you can expect to see at least 50% of those people come to your website. If I had a business, id like to have 175 million people visit my website every month. But SEO isn't all glamorous, the reason being is because of the number of websites that compete for these search results. 6-10 billion pages in google alone, probably over 20 billion between the top 3 search engines. This only accounts for the pages that are indexed(listed). (Indexed means that the search engine has visited a website and displayed its pages as search results) There are probably 75 BILLION webpages awaiting to be indexed in search engines. That's serious competition. That's why proper SEO is basically the single most important factor of any online business. Good search results = traffic and traffic = money.

There is another important part of SEO. That is getting the search engines to "crawl or spider" a webpage quickly and efficiently. This is essential for fast search result listening. Basically you need to reverse engineer how the search engines decides on website rank, placement, ext. The search engines decide on these things with a EXTREMELY complicated formula that they spend billions of dollars every year making more and more complex and efficient, and also protecting it and keeping it secret. Since it is contently changing and very secret, SEO experts are constantly adapting to the changes but have to resort to basing techniques on theory alone...as a result of this, there is often major discrepancies among the SEO community.

One of the single most influential factors a website can have is a backlink. A backlink is defined as a hyper text link pointing to a specific webpage(the webpage that you are promoting). A quality backlink will help the search engines find a webpage and begin to crawl and index it. It also is an important factor that the search engines use to determine a "weight" of a webpage/site. Webpage "weight" is calculated mostly on how many relevant backlinks a site has and the quality of content. This is where the job of a "linkbuilder" takes place. A linkbuilding is basically a very strong marketing and promotion technique. It is vital for the success of a website. Therefor a linkbuilder is a very important asset to an online business. Many times a independent internet business cannot handle linkbuilding, as there are many other parts of the business he needs to take care of. This is why many independent business and even large business outsource linkbuilding. Since it is extremely important, often they are willing to pay a good wage to anyone who wishes to do it.

So now you have an idea why a business would need a linkbuilder. As a linkbuilder you are technically an Internet Advertising and Promotion Assistant. As a link builder you can be promoting a single site or multiple sites depending on the companies specific needs.