This would have to be one of the most confusing aspects for any website owner, what is a quality back link. A really quick tip is this, “internal links can be just as helpful as external links” what this means is that you can get some real authority from the search engines by interlinking your own relevant/related content.
If you have done any research online you will notice that there are many different opinions and advice about what is a quality back link. What you are going to learn in this post is exactly what you need to be doing to not only get a quality back link but links that are what we call evergreen meaning that they will not out your online business at risk.
Firstly forget about all the hype associated with link building and start to focus on quality, I know it is tempting to take the fast track and get someone to outsource this work for you, as it is tedious and very boring not to mention time-consuming for any website business owner.
Understanding The Value
To make it very easy to follow along I will use our site “MarketingTilt” as an example of how to find and built quality back links to your site.
I am also assuming here that you have already read our web design page as this is where you will start to see the power of your back linking.
Our site has been set up with a number of categories such as Web Design, SEO Basics, Back Linking, Copy Writing and so on, these are the areas that we are going to focus on for building themed and relevant links back to our site. Every topic that we have just mentioned is closely related to marketing.
You might also be thinking to yourself that any back link is good like many marketers online would have you believe and all you need to do is have text link diversity, but you would be wrong to follow this advice, you need to stay focused and within your niche with linking.
You are not only trying to generate traffic here but build authority for you site. And you can not do that by getting hundreds of links from sites that are unrelated, it will confuse not only the people coming from those links but also the search engines which will relate to a high bounce rate on your site. Bounce rate is another metric used by Google to measure the quality of your site.
Build Them Gradually & Naturally
When you first start out building links you need to start slowly, it does not look natural to Google if your site gets thousands of links in the first week it was launched and may get you penalized. Most sites that try this are using nothing more than a link farm system, Paid links or have outsourced the work to comment spammers all these techniques can be a breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Nearly all the search engines are aware of these schemes and are looking for a more natural growth and Link Footprint. Most of these links are very low quality and even totally unrelated to your site. It has become much harder after all the algorithm updates which has been close to 500 in 2012 alone to manipulate the search engines.
If you follow all the steps outlined in our back linking series of posts you will…
- Learn where to get these links from.
- How to make sure they are quality links.
- How to correctly structure those links
- Ensure all your links are coming from multiple sources (Link Footprint)
Using these four simple steps above you will ensure that you links mature to their full potential and in time will increase your search engine rankings.
How To Identify A Quality Link
Here is a list of elements to look for in a quality back link, these are what we use in our service to ensure all clients get the best links that are Panda & Penguin proof.
- The site you want the link from needs to be older than 1 year
- Not contain any low quality links usually indicates Link Farms or Blog Networks
- The site needs to have a Page Rank of 3 or more, the higher the better
- The site should be relevant to your site content
- Are they using internal linking on their website
- It needs to have some authority in its niche market, check for any social signals to see FB likes, Tweets and even visit their social profiles to see how many followers they have on those networks.
- Do some research on who is linking to the site you want to link to, also ensure they are not going to be penalized in the future for low quality linking practices.
Duncan Carver has released a very comprehensive eBook on Link Building that every website owner should have, You need to understand this stuff so that you can either instruct your outsource workers or so it yourself. Check Out The Ultimate Link Building Dossier
Jump to our next post on Why Are You Building Back links To Your Site or check out our previous post on Link Spamming.
“Back links, also known as incoming links, inbound links, in-links, and inward links, are links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a back link is any link received by a website (web page, directory, website, or top-level domain) from another website read more about Back Links on WikiPedia”
Marketingtilt is about providing quality information to those looking to start their own website, we do offer services for back-linking, web design and SEO however we also believe that you as a website owner need to have the right information before you spend any money on your online business.
