WebRankers Blog

If you’re new to internet marketing, one tip you may have heard around the internet is that quantity link building is a better campaign than quality link building. However, if you’ve been around the internet awhile you know that a good link building campaign is just the opposite. While it is important to get a good number of links pointing back to you, the quality of the link pointing back is much more vital.

The way to look at it is that a link is like a reference to your website. If you were collecting references for another job, would you try to collect 25 good references or a few really good references? It’s the same thing for your link building services. You want nothing but the best pointing back to your website.

Not only is it a waste of your time to get as many links as possible as oppose to focusing on quality link building campaign, it can also be detrimental to your website. If you have hundreds of links of little value pointing to your website, the search engines may view your website as one with little value. Obviously there are a number of other considerations that search engines take into account, but the links pointing back to your website is certainly one of the criteria.

So how do you know if it is a quality link or not? There are a number of factors that you should take into consideration when starting your link building campaign. One of the most common factors is the link’s page rank. This is a great way to look for quality links because their page is ranked from the search engines. However, you want to look at the page rank of the page that your website will be on, not their home page. It does you no good to look at the page rank of their home page if your link will have no association to it.

Another consideration is how many links are already on the other person’s page. Most people set up a page specifically for links to other websites. It can be difficult at times, but during your link building campaigns you should try to find websites that have no more than 30 links on the page. The page rank for any given page is distributed among the number of links on the page. If you can find a page with 30 other links on it, you will receive 1/30th of the page rank for that page.

The last thing to consider during your link building campaign is whether you like the website or not. Just because a website doesn’t have the highest page rank doesn’t automatically make it a poor website. For all you know it could be a brand new website that will soon have a page rank of 6. The important thing is that you go with your gut instinct and base your link building campaign around quality links and not the quantity of links.

Google has always been on the forefront of search engine algorithm advancements. Their most recent algorithm places an increased emphasis on not only backlinks, but quality backlinks. Gone now are the days in which free for all link farms and massive reciprocal link schemes will deliver instant rankings. Not only will these not help you anymore, in most cases they will hurt you. Despite this, if you put a little bit of time into it, building quality backlinks is not all that difficult.

Quality Backlinks

There are a variety of pieces that go into determining the quality of a website’s backlinks, and each of them can be influenced in some way. For Google, the PageRank (PR) of the website linking to you is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Although Yahoo and MSN don’t have a visible equivalent to PR, a site linking to you that in turn has many high quality backlinks will always be worth more. When searching for link building opportunities do your best to generate backlinks from high PR (4 and up) sites first, and then for lower PR sites. Although not confirmed (Google doesn’t often divulge this kind of thing) it is thought that for each increase of one in PR the value of the backlink, assuming all other things are constant, doubles. So, PageRank is obviously important, however it’s not the whole story.

Having a high PR website all about dogs link to your site about cars will not do all that much for you. In addition to your content, search engines use the content of sites linking to you to determine what your website is all about. So, do your best to identify relevant, high PR websites for your link building campaign. The last piece of the puzzle lies in how your backlinks are formatted. The search engines give more credence to links that come from within body text, and backlinks that have descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text. Although you don’t have much control over how and where other webmasters place your links, you can influence the how by providing your link code, and the where by ensuring that your website is relevant to their visitors. Some of this might seem a little confusing, so the next section goes into more detail on where best to go to generate quality backlinks.

Generate Backlinks

There are a huge variety of ways to generate backlinks and this list is far from exhaustive, so I encourage you to keep your eyes open for linking opportunities at all times. Although very little traffic will ever come from directories and they sometimes have the appearance of link farms, they are where most new webmasters start. Despite what seem to be negatives, there are many directories that will deliver you great high PR backlinks. The most popular and well known directory is DMOZ (Open Directory Project), and although it can take a long time to get your site reviewed, I recommend submitting there no matter what.

Beyond that, do a search for web directories, identify the ones that have high PR, and those that are relevant to your websites content, and submit away. Another effective way to build backlinks is by showing other webmasters that your site can provide a valuable resource to their visitors. Contact the webmaster through e-mail and explain how you can be a valuable resource, provide your linking code, and a description of your website. Some webmasters may ask you for a reciprocal link, and although this is not ideal, if the other website is relevant to yours, it will help with search engine rankings. One of my favorite methods is to build links by writing articles and submitting them to free article directories.

These directories are set up for webmasters to get free content for their sites; however they are required to leave the author bio that you write at the bottom of the articles. So make sure your bio includes a link to your site with strong, keyword-rich anchor text. Finally, become a member of the online community with which your website is related. Find blogs, and forums that have similar topics, sign-up and start asking and answering questions, and sharing your knowledge. By providing links to your site in your signature you can generate huge numbers of relevant backlinks.

Link building is time consuming, and at times it can be frustrating, but by doing these things you are creating a strong base for your website to grow. After a few months, these links will “mature” and you’ll start moving up the search engine rankings. In the meantime, these links can provide you with a source of traffic without relying entirely on Google or Yahoo.