We all know it; we’ve always known it and we’ll tell our own clients and anyone who’ll listen until we’re blue in the interface. It’s ALL about quality not quantity. Quality outs. Quality ins. It’s the quality of your link neighborhood that matters most, not the volume of inbound links that carries most weight, in Google’s take on relevance and, ultimately, your search placement.
How much, though, do we follow our own advice? How much elbow grease do we really commit to the building of quality inbound links? After all, when they say in general terms the quality and the usefulness of your links is proportionate to the difficulty in obtaining them, it’s hardly a surprise. Why should the natural law of SEO link building fly in the face of the natural law of business, or even of life? No free lunches and no free wins – anything worth having is worth fighting for and all that.
Committing to quantity and not quality not only puts you in danger of wasting time, energy and expense but there is an opportunity cost too. While you’re out there furiously spamming no follow blogs and forums, submitting your site to pointless directories and search engines that see more virtual tumble weed than human visitors, the competition is stealing a march. While you’re building huge audiences of irrelevant and disinterested visitors through Reddit (or even, Google forbid, buying thousands of cheap farmed links) your competition may very well be drawing in your target audience through a considered, patient and sustainable strategy of attracting quality links from ranking sites. Damn.
So what should you be looking for? What sort of links constitute quality and deserve your energy? Well here are the two most important issues:
Links from genuine sites with domains established over time are perfect, especially if your link is within editorial or relevant to an editorial piece. Think the BBC or the New York Times for mega link juice. It’s the authority of these authoritative sites which themselves enjoy numerous high quality inbound links that flows through.
Anchor text – the labelling of you hypertext. Make it clear to the search engines what your link relates to. If you’re a web design company for example having Web Design as the anchor text of your inbound link sends a much more powerful message than ‘click here’ or ‘next page’ or any other language that doesn’t relate to your keywords.
Want to know more? Talk to an SEO pro and ask them how they build quality links.