They say that content is King. It certainly is. But link building is still the most important part of any search engine optimisation campaign. Alas, it’s not as simple as throwing money here, there and everywhere. Not all links are created equal, so if you want great results, you need to find great links.
The first thing you need to do before you begin building links is to establish your budget. Once you know what funds are available, you can break down your budget and devise a plan of quantity vs quality.
Bespoke Vs Cheap Links
One good quality link could worth the same weight in SEO as a few cheaper links, so looking for quality over quantity can often pay off. So what should you look for when building links to your site? Firstly, you have to choose websites to link from for their relevance – stick to your industry and your niche in order to create a natural link profile.
Links within the content will be much more valuable than a footer link, sidebar link (such as a blogroll) or a link from a link directory page, which makes guest blogging a great way to build links from influential and trusted sites.
Check List for Great Links
1. Theme of content – the content is extremely important when it comes to link building. But you also need to check the relevance of the entire site too, which includes checking its external links. Their outgoing links should be thematic to the rest of the website.
2. Domain authority and trust – this is SEOMoz’s prediction of how well a website will perform in Google rankings. Domain authority is measured using over 150 signals against Google’s algorithm.
3. Google PageRank / link juice – each page of a website will vary in Google PageRank so it’s important to establish which page you will be linking from. The higher the PR the better, but there are also other factors which could affect the amount of link juice passed on.
4. Domain age – links from older domains usually carry a little more weight in SEO.
5. Number of links going into the site – websites with a large number of unique domain links are good places to link from. Think of links as popularity and esteem; the more links pointing to it, the better the website.
6. External links – try to find websites which don’t have too many outgoing links so they can pass on more domain authority.
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