A complete guide to finding the best back link sources for your link building campaign. These seven questions will save you days of trail and error and also reveal the exact quality standards an effective linking page must comply with.
One of the toughest jobs a SE marketer deals with on a regular basis is finding quality web pages and domain names to embed their back links on. In this short article I try to provide an effective checklist to make the right choices when researching for back link recipients
Seven Queries for examining each of your future backlink suppliers:
1. What are their own inbound linking sources?
Authoritative websites usually appear in top general directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory. Their information is constantly back linked throughout the market they operate in,
not to mention the buzz (followed by additional backlinks) they generate in the social environment attached to that market.
Then again, there are a bunch of webmasters that focus on getting backlinks regardless of the niche the recipient is in. Linking partnerships with these SEO novices should be excluded from the very beginning.
Good analysis for link structures are obtained fairly cheap with different SEO instruments available today.
2. Does their articles/videos/podcasts incite you to further explore the site?
Take a good look of the articles, videos, etc. published on the site and see if they correspond to your reader's needs.
If there is a natural match between your personal approaches to the niche and also there is some potential for improving your own site's traffic stats, you should definitely negotiate a link.
Before satisfying SEO reasons strive to bring value to your readers and future clients.
3. Does your prospect web page has any link authority or PageRank?
Do not just look at the PageRank assigned to the site's homepage, instead go deep and find out exactly what PR value has the web page you intend having the link on.
This phenomenon is best explained with blogs. Take for example a new blog posts. When first made live, it appears on the website front page - the home page. In this position it is assigned greater authority due to the homepage's PageRank value. As other articles are being poured into the site, that particular blog post is pushed lower and lower until it falls on the second page of the home page. Here the PR is zero, so that initial authority fades away. Of course blogs are well dealt with by the search engines and this authority isn't passed and taken away so easily, but this is a general presentation to give you an idea of how PageRank flows.
Think long term; if the whole website meats the criteria presented on this article, get the link even if the targeted page has, momentarily, low authority.
4. With whom do these sites entertain SEO and social relationships?
Prestigious sites are members of well known web communities.
They operate as neurological synapses permitting link juice to flow smoothly between members of the same mastermind group. See if your prospect website has a hybrid collection of unrelated websites that it refers with back links. If so, know that it carries little to no trust both from the SE and visitor's standpoint.
If it doesn't link out to other themed websites, then it probably has no authority to share and it's not worth the effort of reaching out for a back link. Needless to say that Google is reluctant to assigning link authority to websites that conduct blatant PageRank sculpting or PageRank preservation tactics.
5. Are they organizing "link auctions"?
If that's the case then most surely they are selling links.
You should stay away from these link farms because search engines constantly demote the link equity for these sites and when this happens your investment becomes futile.
6. Do they have a recent cache date and are present in organic listings?
Make sure the website you plan on getting a back link from ranks for your targeted or related keywords in the SERPs. It must be found at least in the first 3 search results pages.
To be really picky I should say that even the 3rd page isn't good enough but at least there is potential for growth. To get a detailed report use SEO Digger and Compete.com.
7. Are they popular throughout the community?
This criteria targets the exposure that your prospect websites must provide your business with. Even though they're not SEO masterpieces, websites that enjoy high numbers of subscribers bring you a great deal of referral traffic. Checking subscribers stats can be done with Google Reader.
