Link Building Strategies: Ideal Site Attributes
All links come from somewhere. Links have to be from a website to a website. Inbound links are links from another website to yours. We’ve already established the importance of having quality inbound links from quality websites but just what are the attributes of a quality website?
Domain age
As I’ve written on one of my earlier entries, domain age matters. It might not account for a huge chunk of your SEO factor but you can never replace or pay for time. The older the site is, the more trusted it is by Google. Getting links from older sites are tough but if and when you do, it pays off.
Page rank
Google page rank has been in confusion lately that even Google claims it doesn’t know how to use it anymore. My take on this one is that Google’s claim may have some truths – but I think it still holds some weight when it comes to a site’s link authority.
Google may have decreased the effect of a site’s page rank with its link authority but it still does have an effect nonetheless.
Inbound links
A website’s inbound links says a lot about a website’s authority and reputation. Less links means obviously less influence. If you’re studying up websites to get links from, you would want to check their inbound links in order for you to:
1) Have more choices of websites to get inbound links from
2) Gauge how much authority that website has based on the quality of its inbound links
To check a site’s inbound links, you can use Yahoo’s site explorer backlink watch. It’s one of the easily accessible ways that you can use the tool is to type out site:https://domainname.com in the Yahoo search text area. It will instantly show you a number of websites that are linking to the domain name that you typed in.
Track those links, list them down. Find out how the website got those links – then try to get some of those for your own.
Outbound links
Whenever you study a website you’re planning to get links from, always go through their outbound links. Do they have lots of outbound links? Are you just going to be one of the outbound links in their website?
Always remember that an outbound link passes on Google Juice to where it’s linking to. Meaning the website that has that outbound link in it is losing some Google juice as it gives some to where it’s pointing out to. A site that has LOTS of outbound links means that it has given away lots of Google juice to that much sites already.
So think, what else will be left for you if you’re just one of many?
Traffic
Of course, to know if a website is doing well, you have to take a look at the people coming in and visiting the site. If there are few people, it can only mean that the site isn’t really all too interesting. Common sense.
Some of the tools you can use to gauge a website’s traffic is Compete, Quantcast and Alexa. These websites will give you a rough idea as to just how much people are coming in their website as traffic.
You just have to keep in mind that these tools are not completely accurate. I don’t even know where they’re getting their data from. But it helps. Somehow their data is a good estimation of studying a website’s traffic and quality.
This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Link Building Strategies
You can also check our comprehensive all-in-one guide about Effective link building strategies