How To Evaluate High Quality Links In Your Site

Businesses need to grow, and one way to achieve this is through digital marketing. This means that your business needs to create a robust presence on the World Wide Web so you can have that leverage against competitors. When narrowed down, digital marketing also comprises many strategies, one of which is link building.

Link building refers to your website's process of having links on your content to other authority sites within the same niche. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic in, build trust with potential website visitors, and gain a higher market share of customers. But before you achieve all that, you've to learn to choose among the different links as not all of these works to be effective.

What's the best way for you to determine which links to use and which ones to put aside? This article gives you the factors that are necessary to determine the quality of links on your site.

1. Should Be Relevant To Your Site

One of the determinants of quality links is relevance. This means that the links you insert on your website should redirect to another site that's relevant to your niche and specific topic. Otherwise, your links will look too spammy. Also, it won't have any bearing on your content or website when it links to another completely irrelevant site.

Here are some ways that you can effectively build relevant links on your site:

• Create content that other websites will also be pleased about linking to.
• Write columns for online publications so that you can consistently publish articles that contain links back to your website.
• Make use of web directories as these can provide useful information to your potential customers.

For example, you're running a website that's selling online training to medical sales representatives. You should choose a link from a site that contains everything an interested trainee will need to know about working as a medical sales representative. 

However, remember to take special care that the site you're linking too isn't a competitor. Otherwise, you're making them score higher in terms of traffic and SEO. 

2. Should Provide Value Beyond SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most viable facets of digital marketing. This refers to all the metrics in place that enable your website to rank higher. This means that when an Internet user keys in a search on search engines, with good SEO strategies implemented, your website makes it on the top search results. 

There are many strategies that SEO employs, and one of the most effective is link building. When achieved, these links can help increase brand awareness. But to ensure that your links are the best quality for your site, choose those that provide results and have a value that goes beyond SEO.

Here are some ways for you to evaluate your links based on SEO:

• Remodel some of your old content by turning them into Infographics as these are some of the most popular content on the Internet when it comes to link building for SEO.
• Apply Newsjacking, which refers to the process of injecting your brand into the stories of the day so you can find an angle whereby it'll relate to your brand or topic.
• Get to know the competitors' links so that you can link to them.
• Practice reciprocal linking, which means linking back to other sites that also link to you.  

3. Should Have A Strong Audience

Remember that the very purpose you have for link building is to drive more traffic to your website or make your site more competitive. Therefore, you'll also necessarily have to choose links or websites that already have a strong audience. Otherwise, your link-building process won't yield positive results for your site.

Always choose to link to websites that already have a strong audience as this current audience can help increase your traffic and followers. When these authority sites link back to you, their followers will know about your brand's existence. When this is achieved, you know that you're successful in your pursuit of driving more audience in. 

4. The Linking Sites Shouldn't Be Difficult For You To Apply

The difficulty score is an internal link analysis tool that calculates your anticipation of how difficult it is to obtain links on a particular site. As you start to evaluate the various links that you may already have, applying the difficulty score is a good metric to apply.

When scoring based on difficulty, here are some aspects for you to apply:

• How often the website posts new content
• How successful is the website in engaging with their audience
• How often the website receives visitors in a month

While this may be hard to master at first, once you get the hang of it, it remains to be one of the best ways to determine whether or not a link will be good for your website. 

5. The Links Aren't Devoid Of Human Value

The sites that you link to shouldn't be made solely to please web crawlers. Rather, they should contain enough human quality for it to be visited by real human beings. This means that there's organic traffic coming in. 

Remember that your goal here isn't just to rank well with search engines; the web crawlers can help with this. But you'll also want to have real visitors going through your content and eventually making a purchase. 

6. The Links Should Have A Strong Social Share

Today, you can't deny the effectiveness of social media sites to spread the word about a brand’s existence. A high-quality link to your site is one that has a strong social share. This means checking whether or not the links are shared and talked about on various social media sites.

The more social shares a link to a site has, the higher the chances of driving more traffic to your site.   

Conclusion

Not every link is created equal. This poses a challenge on your part as you’ll need to learn how to choose from the many. Otherwise, you may be using links that have no weight or positive effect on your website. 

Link building is one of the best digital marketing strategies that you can apply, so make the most out of these. Use the factors above to evaluate which links are of good quality and which aren't.

Subscribe to weekly updates

You’ll also receive some of our best posts today