Components of a Quality Links - Link Building

There are Seven Primary Components That Define Valuable Link:

• Relevance: valuable links are relevant to your market, industry or community. Valuable link sources are within your neighborhood on the web and provide you with accurate co-citation.

• Context: valuable links are contextual and come from sources with keyword-focused pages. How do you know if a page is keyword-focused? Well, does it rank? In most competitive markets, pages that rank well - and hold their rankings - are semantically well-optimized and have plenty of descriptive text on the page. You want your link surrounded by that keyword-themed content.

• Difficulty: in general, valuable links are difficult to obtain. There is an associated cost: whether it’s in the investment of the link itself (note that I’m not talking about paid links), in the content that secures the link, in the site development and design, or in the time requirement getting in front of the webmaster. Valuable links are not inexpensive to secure, and they’re not easy to secure. The most valuable links come from sources where your competitors are unlikely to get the same link.

• Humanity: valuable links require a human element to obtain. We all like direct link sources, but quite often the most high-value backlinks come from sources that have a human being in control of the website. You are picking up the phone and calling a webmaster, or emailing a contact person, or networking with someone in charge of an influential site or blog at a conference. There is almost always a human being in charge of creating links on the pages you want to target.

• Credibility: a quality link comes from a credible source. Credible link sources elevate the perceived credibility of the site they’re linking to because they’re already trusted sources.

• Authority: working alongside the credibility quotient is authority. High quality links come from authoritative sources, either in your niche or in the wide environment of the web.

• Investment: valuable links require an investment of some sort. This factor goes hand-in-hand with the Difficulty factor. There’s an associated cost involved, whether in the development of a targeted piece of content or survey, in the purchase of the link, in the design and launch of the site, or simply in the time required to influence the influencers.