High Quality Link Building Starts with Targeting Right Sites

High quality link building for search engine optimization is a tedious, often frustrating and sometimes rewarding job.

It is tedious because it takes a great deal of research to find a high-quality site and then a high-quality page on that site to place the link.

It is often frustrating because finding such a site is becoming more rare and difficult. Managers of sites that have quality rankings certainly won’t hand out links to anyone. In fact, they rarely do anymore.

Even if they did, then the challenges continue — whether they offer nofollow or the more valuable do follow links, the prominence of the links and the anchor text in the links.

Go looking for blogs, forums or articles that list sites offering high quality link building. It’s highly unlikely anyone with high competence in online marketing will reveal those sites because they are precious commodities.

Creating High Quality Links

The truth is, the majority of backlinks that appear naturally and as the result of someone else are often low quality. They are put on a site somewhere, and the link is low quality if the page is low quality. A site that gets a backlink from USAToday.com, for example, can count itself lucky.

The site or page may vanish one day because the owner decided to shut it down, retire, get another job, etc.

Major, top quality sites do get links from other sites. But what about the rest of us?

We create our own top-quality links with:

• Our own external blogs
• Social media accounts
• Content marketing
• Forum postings
• Blog comments
• Video sites

It’s the usual list. But the important point is not just creating back links, but high-quality back links.

They have a few things in common.

The page where the link resides has substantial and original content. There is low competition in the search engines for the topic in question.

The page itself has received a high level of visits and redistribution via email and social media buttons. A high level of comments will increase its visibility.

A page with a low bounce rate and exit rate will rank higher when combined with quality back links.

Throwing the Dice

If we created a page on a well-regarded site, we can control the quality by the amount and quality of the content that goes on the page.

We may do a good job of optimizing the page for search engine optimization, but what if there is too much competition for that subject? If the page gets buried, it won’t receive enough visits, comments or distributions to improve that ranking.