SEO 101: Link Building And Off-Site Optimization (Part 4 Of 5)

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If you’ve been keeping up with my five-part series thus far, you can go ahead and skip down to the “basic premise” section. If this is new to you, here’s all you need to understand: this article is the fourth entry of a five-part series intended to help novice users and newcomers understand the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). So far, I’ve covered basic strategy and planning, on-site SEO, and ongoing content marketing. After this section, link building and off-site optimization, all that remains is measurement and analysis.

Ready to get started? Here we go!

The Basic Premise

When Google determines rankings for a given search query, it looks at two primary factors: relevance and authority. I’ve already covered relevance in the strategy and on-site content portions of this series, so now it’s time to learn about authority. Essentially, authority is a measure of how trustworthy or your content is. Your site will have a qualitative “domain authority” score overall, along with individual “page authority” scores for each of your individual pages. Both of these depend heavily on the quality and quantity of links pointing back to your site—and the higher they are, the higher your pages will rank in organic search results, in general.

Anatomy of a Perfect Link

First, understand that not all links are alike. Google’s Penguin update looks at the quality of a link carefully before determining how much authority it passes. To build a “perfect” link, you need to keep the following in mind:

• Source authority. First, the more authoritative the source of the link, the more valuable the link’s going to be. That’s why links from low-authority or untrustworthy sources are practically useless, and might actively harm your brand’s reputation with search engines.


• Source relevance. The relevance of the external site to your site also comes into play. For example, if you’re in the woodworking industry and you’re posting on a niche cupcake-baking website, that’s going to raise some red flags (unless your content topic can bridge that gap in a logical way).


• Content value. The quality of your off-site content—the material “housing” your inbound link—matters significantly. Here, you’ll want to follow most of the same guidelines that you follow for your on-site work, but you’ll also need to make some adjustments for the specific publishers you’re using.


• Anchor text. It used to be a best practice to include target keywords into the anchor text of your links, but these days it’s better to use natural, journalistic language as your anchor text.


• Contextual value. Your link shouldn’t stand out as obvious. It should be natural, valuable, and helpful to readers.

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SEO 101: Link Building And Off-Site Optimization (Part 4 Of 5)