Link building and backlinking are definitely some of the most important aspects of SEO optimization for any website. Unfortunately, learning how to identify quality sites for link building can take an awful amount of time; that’s one of the SEO tasks that will take up a big chunk of your work hours. With that in mind, we hope to make it all easier for you by providing you with a list of the most crucial metrics for link building!
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Trust Metrics and Ranking
When you decide to attempt quantifying the value of a website as an SEO expert, in most cases, you will use services such as Moz, Ahrefs, or Alexa. And these serve a specific purpose: to analyze massive data sets and classify available website information into two categories, trust, and rating metrics.
The ratings represent the position that a website holds in the independent analyses performed by each of the services mentioned above. On the other hand, the trust metrics are there to show the “opinion” that search engines have of the given website. These metrics may have different labels or names in various services, but their purpose remains the same.
For instance, Moz provides search engine trust ratings through their MozTrust domain score, while they have their own ratings on MozRank. Most platforms that offer SEO platforms or software will have two services like that.
A proper level of niche relevance
If you’re someone who has begun to identify quality sites for link building, you know how many crucial factors there are to take into account. For instance, when it comes to your content placement, anchors play an important role for SEO purposes. However, the effectiveness of your links and anchors also depends on the broader context of the website where you’re placing them.
In other words, niche relevance is a key factor when it comes to link building. Of course, technically, there’s pretty much no rule against putting your links and content on websites that are from entirely disparate business niches. That would widen the number of websites you have available for link building, right?
Well, not really. In reality, regardless of the authority of the website that you’re using for link building, it won’t yield many leads or much traffic if the niche is wrong. To put it in layman’s terms, if you try to use a fishing blog to build links toward your music store, it simply won’t work.
Keyword Research
All websites that have undergone the process of search engine optimization try to rank for specific keywords. Again, these keywords are tightly interwoven with the niche in question. Considering this, keyword research becomes an excellent way to identify quality sites for link building.
Once you’ve performed the keyword optimization of your content, you can analyze your potential websites for link building and see which spots use the most similar keywords. That way, you’ll know that you’ve run into the best possible niche placement for your content. There are plenty of available tools for keyword research, including those provided by Google itself.
Geography
These days, online vendors have access to an audience that’s wider and more diverse than ever before. Someone working to promote products or services targeted at an international market has plenty of opportunities for profit.
However, while this globalization trend is going strong, that’s not to say that localized businesses are not thriving. In fact, more often than not, you will find that businesses that serve a specific area are making the best use of the Internet for promotional purposes.
If that’s the case with the website that you’re trying to build links to, make sure that you identify quality sites for link building in the appropriate area. You can do this by checking if the host address and the website’s primary language coincide with yours. If the DNS servers of the link-building website are in your home country, that’s close enough in terms of geographical location.
The Content
Of course, in most cases, you will be presenting your own content on these link-building websites. That being said, your content isn’t the only one that matters. You want to ensure that the stuff you intend to post is surrounded by other quality content; good backlinks are pretty much the only backlinks that matter.
You can surmise a lot from the structure of the other content itself. Plenty of people perform technical optimization of content that’s only good for the myriad web crawlers of search engines, but it appears awful for humans. This is something you want to avoid as you identify quality sites for link building, seeing as you’re not just looking for traffic and clicks; ultimately, you want conversions into paying customers.
So, if you see a lot of content with just H1 tags in the beginning; this means that there wasn’t much thought put into the structuring of the blogs or pages. There are also SEO tools that can perform these checks automatically, instead of you having to do it “on foot”.
Backlink Analysis
Before you can use a site for link building, you need to ensure that the links that lead towards it are of sufficient quality as well; after all, these are links that will indirectly lead to your website as well. Doing this means performing an analysis on the backlink profile of the website; this will measure the quality of every single link that goes toward that website, and provide you with a bottom-line score.
As we’ve said before, anchors matter, so ensure that you’re not dealing with a website that has plenty of spammy anchors leading to it, or one that’s connected to websites that seem suspicious according to the backlink analysis.
There are plenty of factors that you can use to identify quality sites for link building; just make sure that you have all of the information before affiliating yourself with any websites through the link-building process.
