3 Questions to Help Your SEO Link Building Strategy

3 Questions To Ask When Building Your External Link Profile

Link building these days is a far from simple thing. Not only do links have to be plentiful, they have to be relevant, reliable, work well with the content of your page, and be generally as impressive as you can make them. These kinds of links don't just flock to your site – you have to spend time hunting each one of them down. It's hours of work.

If you're going to put this much effort into gaining a link, it had better be worth it. To that end, you should be asking yourself the following series of questions:

1. Is the link relevant to the page?

Relevance is a tricky thing. Simply having a site about cane toads linking to your site about cane toads isn't enough any more. You need to consider three things:

*Whether the site is generally relevant. Okay, this is the part of the process where you worry about the cane toads. Having the two sites match up to each other in some way is a good sign that the link is going to be a valuable one.
*Whether the page being linked from is relevant. Yes, it's from a site about cane toads, but is it from their 'about us' page or something a little more relevant?
*Whether the link works for the page it's linking to. So you've managed to get a link from a page providing advice on getting rid of cane toads, but it's useless if it's linking to your 'about us' page.

2. Is the linking site a good one?

The next essential element in a link is the quality of the link you're getting. To assess that, you need to do a little analysis of the site, looking at it from a buyer's perspective. This pretty much covers all of the things you've been doing to your own site, such as looking at the quality and freshness of the content, the quality of the design, and the presence of actual human beings behind the site.

Another area not to be forgotten in this analysis is the site's connections with social media. Just as social media is contributing a lot of value to your site, it is a good indication of value in a link.

3. Is the link going to bring traffic?

The last set of ideas to consider centres around what the search engines are really looking for: indications of genuinely organic links. When it comes to these, things like recommendations or references are ideal, as are resources. If the link looks like it's been crammed on the page because someone did a deal for it, chances are the search engines will pick up on it.

It isn't just about whether the link looks right on the page, either. The question you need to ask yourself is whether a human being clicking on the link will think that it's worthwhile. The issues discussed above will resolve a lot of this, but doing a basic estimate is also worthwhile.