Digital marketing has made its mark in the world today as the most superior form of promotion and advertising. As the search engines continue to evolve and give brands and their websites better reach online, marketers use various methods to remain visible in the digital world.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization has become the most result-oriented technique to create brand awareness among these methods. SEO is all about reaching the top of the SERPs for visitors to engage with a website and become potential customers. Search engine algorithms determine a website’s ranking based on multiple factors characterized by On-page and Off-page SEO. On-page is about creating an attraction on a website’s landing page. It includes design aesthetics, color schemes, informative content, etc. Off-page SEO, however, is all about receiving quality and relevant endorsement from other high-reputation websites. Marketers receive this endorsement in the form of links. The rankings obtained on a SERP depend primarily on the quality of the links you receive. Marketers need to establish a strategy using the proper SEO link building tools that ensure quality over quantity to gain high rankings.
Importance of Link Quality
Link building is about having a high authority site point towards your website. While you have multiple ways to receive backlinks, blog posts and website pages remain the most relevant. Whenever an authority site redirects towards your page, they endorse that the content and information present have relevancy and are worth sharing. It shows that having quality links is a crucial factor that determines and impacts your rankings. Hence, quality linking is a prominent factor for SERPs as the whole point of searching is to gain information. Search engines interpret the quality of links you have and then decipher your website’s importance and authority accordingly.
Determining Quality in Link Building
A quality link is received from a very high authority site with a reputation on the internet as trusted. Websites with high authority produce the best quality links that you need to ensure your receive and maintain your rankings. Since stuffing lots of links to gain ranking has become outdated, marketers need to ensure quality in their link building strategies to guarantee long-term results. You can use multiple methods to determine your links’ quality, four of which are listed below.
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Check for Relevance
The best and preferred method to determine the quality of a link is to check for its relevance. Links without some degree of relevance look manipulative and are not worth your time. An excellent way to test relevance is to ask yourself why a particular site will link to you. If you have trouble finding a compelling answer for the query, it is better to move to a new prospect. Link relevancy has four types: domain-to-domain, domain-to-page, page-to-page, and link-to-page.
Domain-to-domain relevancy is to check whether the site that links to you has equal relevancy to your site. It is the weakest form of relevancy check but still worth considering. For example, if your site relates to fitness, then a real estate website link is not at all relevant.
Domain-to-page relevancy is whether a page linking to your website is relevant. Sometimes a website might not have relevance, but individual pages might. Check if the page linking to your website resonates with your content or not.
The third type, page-to-page relevancy, is about the page linking to your page (landing page or blog post, etc.) that has relevant information present. And last, the test link-to-page is to determine if the link received makes contextual sense to your page content or not. All these tests are straightforward as it comes down to your intuition to determine if there is relevancy present.
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Check for Domain Authority
Doing a domain authority (DA) check is a must for a quality link-building strategy. The higher the website’s domain authority, the better it is to link with such domains. High domain authority means that the site has value and trust among the internet community. If you have a large website, it is best to distribute links with high DA. Having a few high DA links present is always better than having no influence present at all.
Remember that there are more domains with no influence present on the internet, so you have to work your way for a high DA link. You can use various tools to check the domain authority of a site you want to link and choose accordingly. You have to keep both domain authority and page authority (PA) in check while using these tools. However, DA always has more importance than PA in a link-building strategy.
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Human Value
Determine the Quality of a Link that offers real value to people. When thinking about the value a link provides to online visitors, consider their placement on a page and if it makes sense or not. Determine if someone will receive relevant information or solution through the link you receive.
Quality links should contribute overall to the site it links to and the ones who click that link. If a site owner willingly gives you a link that offers no value to the audience, consider it a red flag. It will help if you examined if the link you have is helpful for visitors. After all, they are the ones who will engage with your site. The same goes for a link pointing towards the wrong audience. You have to match your targeted audience carefully with the links you receive if they offer human value.
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Using Google Webmaster Tools Link Report
Google Webmaster Tools is the ultimate reporting mechanism that examines the quality of the links. It reports the 1,000 domains that link to pages on your website. These links refer to the total number of created links by a domain that points to your site’s pages. Linked pages refer to the number of pages that the domain has linked. Therefore, if a domain links to 10 pages on your site, these links will be on every page of their own website. You can download that report to extract the sample of the exact pages that link to your site. Remember that many links and linked pages mean a low-quality site and take it as a red flag.
Final Word
The points, mentioned above about why Determine the Quality of a Link, help you examine the quality of your links. However, it all comes down to your instincts and judgment about the information a referring link possesses. Link quality matters most in designing your backlink strategy, and you can determine that by taking guidance from these methods.
