To continue our series on getting better backlinks, I want to discuss some ideas behind a solid link building strategy. Too often I check out the link profile of a site that isn’t ranking and their backlinks suck. There seems to be no reason or strategy behind how and why they are getting specific links. I’d like to cover a few basic parts of a link building strategy.

Homepage Links vs Internal Links

Getting links to subpages within your site is a signal of quality. When building links, you need to build links to both your home page and subpages on your site. If you’re only getting homepage links, you will see limited ranking ability on pages deep in your site.

Of course, this is not always a simple task. Building resources and creating linkbait are highly effective methods of building links to internal pages, but if you’re grasping for links to internal pages, you can do a bit of article marketing, which will help with long tail phrases.

Get Links to Important Content

In addition to simply gaining internal links, you need to focus on earning links to your important content. I consider “important content” to be pages that convert well, pages that you want traffic on, or pages that you want to rank.

Many times important content can be linkbait at the same time, but if the content is commercially focused, it may be hard to get links for it. In that case, you may want to consider setting up a mini link farm.

Trust vs High PR

PageRank and the trust of a domain are two separate factors when looking at the value of a link. Of course, a high PR link is extremely valuable. You should focus on getting links from pages with a lot of link juice (PR is a rough measure of this). In addition though, focus on getting links from trusted domains, even if it comes from a low PR page. A good example of this would be a Yahoo directory listing. Although these links pass little link juice, it is a trust signal that tells search engines your site received a human review.

I recommend obtaining a mix of high PR and high trust links (not always the same thing).

Link Volume vs Domain Volume

Link popularity is a skewed metric. My Yahoo link count makes my site appear less important, but I perform well relative to the number of links I have. The reason behind this is “domain diversity”. I don’t have a lot of links, but I have a lot of domains linking to me (relative to my link count). If I get a site wide link from a domain, that may appear as hundreds of links in Yahoo. Due to diminishing returns, these links do not push the value of hundreds of links. Usually you’re receiving the value of 2 to 5 links or so. So when I see a site with 5,000 links, but the majority of them come from blogrolls, I know their link profile is weaker than it appears. If I see a site with 5,000 links, but the majority comes from a single page on a domain with a link in the content, then I know that domain is stronger than the one with mainly site wide links.

I recommend you spend time looking at links on a domain level, not just a page level, because Google seems to be placing a fair bit of weight on domain level analysis. If you want to track how many domains are linking to a site, you should check out the SEOMoz Pro membership. They have a toolbar that feeds you this type of information from linkscape.

Topical vs Non-Topical

I believe you should focus on getting links that are on and off topic. Links from pages or sites with topical relevance give you more relevance in that niche, but off topic links spread your reach.

Not only would I want to be referenced by SEO blogs as an SEO, but I would love to be referenced by web designers, programmers, small business owners, make money online bloggers, affiliate bloggers, etc.

You want to expand your reach in both depth and breadth.

I don’t mean you should get WAY off topic links. People get in trouble with things like off topic widgets, so avoid that. Instead, expand to topics loosely related to your topic. For example, I could guest blog on a site about upstart businesses to explain why you should consider SEO when promoting your new business. That site wouldn’t be in the internet marketing niche and would expose me to a new niche, but it’s still relevant. I think this would be a stronger brand boost than simply staying in your own niche all the time.

How to Approach This

SEO rarely has a set system of “do this” and profit. The best advice I can give is “try to get a lot of high quality anchor links from as many different place as you possibly can”. I also suggest that you avoid getting stuck on one type of link. The more diversity, the more long term potential your link profile will have.

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