Various Link Building Methodologies

It's no secret that Google uses links to measure the authority of web pages. If a web page attracts links from other pages Google's algorithm, the software it uses to rank pages and decide which page is number one for a search result, increases the importance of a page.

 

If you’re at all involved in publishing content to the web, then you probably care about traffic. If you care about traffic then you probably care about SEO. If you care about SEO, then you probably care about generating links to your web site.

Today, Google is backing up the tough talk with a hard-core focus on quality and relevant links to your site; and a bunch of crappy links from crappy sites with over-optimized anchor text will do you no good at all (provided it doesn’t get you removed from the index altogether).

Domain Authority – It is a measure of the importance of a link and take into account the site’s age, its content and its popularity (Social and Links) among other factors. There is no single metric that defines domain authority, but here are some common stats/tools to use:

Number of Ranking Keywords – How many keywords the site ranks for in Google. One tool to find this data is SEMRush.com

Backlinks – Is the number of sites that link to a page or site. Opensiteexplorer.org, MajesticSEO.com, and Ahrefs.com are sites that provide backlink data.

Traffic – Is the number of people that visit a site via target links. Alexa.com and Compete.com both provide traffic estimations and rankings of websites.

Domain Age – Is the creation date of the site. There are many tools on the internet that will share the registered date of a domain including Domaintools.com, Whois.net and Archive.org.

Google Page Rank – Is Google’s estimation of link popularity. Google provides a toolbar that shows Page Rank. There are many other SEO tools that show Google Page Rank.

Social Popularity – Is how many likes, tweets, shares a site receives from Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Linkedin.com, etc. Sharedcount.com is tool that provides social stats estimates.

Relevance – Is the degree of the relationship between the target site and the content of the originating linking site. Links from topical authorities are very powerful. For example, a link from a sports news site is very beneficial to a site selling athletic apparel.