You should probably know by now that the best way for ranking higher in search engines is to start link building. Backlinks of a website are the most important votes when it comes to Google deciding whether your site deserves a top ranking for certain keywords or not.

Many folks are following white hat, legit link building strategies, others decide to go “on the dark side” and build links through black hat methods, however these features below are a total must for any successful link building campaign.

1.      Website relevancy

Although many SEOs consider that “a link is a link is a link”, when trying to get only the crème de la crème of backlinks you should definitely consider searching for highly relevant websites to get links from. If you are selling for example sports shoes, a relevant backlink can come from shoes, sports, athletes websites, and not only.

2.      Number of outbound links

You should definitely search for pages/websites that keep their outbound links levels low and most important, if they are linking out to websites promoting pharma, casinos you should skip that very website, of course, unless you are promoting these type of products/services as well.

3.      Domain authority

Domain authority is calculated based on many factors, such as page rank, age, number of backlinks, relevancy of backlinks etc. You can easily check a website’s authority by using a free tool such as SEOQuake.

4.      Anchor text

We cannot stress enough for the importance of anchor text. You want to rank for a term like web design, then try to get backlinks to your website anchored with that very text. Important: never overdo it! You should try to also get backlinks with variation of your keyword and also containing your brand name in anchor, so that your entire link building campaign will seem natural.

We have written in the past about link pyramids and a link building strategies that seem to be “the next best thing” after link wheels. Basically, the idea is to setup the backlinks for a certain website in layers, such as:

1^st layer – these are the best links, all of them pointing to your landing pages with the best anchor text; most SEOs use for the first tier social networking websites as they are aged and hold lot of authority but lately many SEOs are starting to use links from reviews and Build My Rank articles, as they usually come from quality places

2^nd layer – depending on how many layers your pyramid will consist of, you can use for this one again blog posts, high PR forum profiles or even other social networks

3^rd layer – this is most of the times done by automation tools such as Article Marketing Robot, Xrumer or Scrapebox; these are the worst links a landing page could receive but pointing to buffer sites make an excellent choice to give an extra link juice

But what keywords should you use as anchors for 2^nd and 3^rd layers? Before being closed, Google Wonder Wheel was a great choice to find LSI keywords to use as anchors, however there are many other good places to find related keywords to use. From Google Keyword Tool to suggestion tool, these are some recommended places to start looking for related long tail keywords to be used in your link building campaign.

Many webmasters are usually asking what is to be done in case their websites are let’s say 1-2 months old, related to link building. Developing a link building strategy for an old, authority website is most of the times a difficult task but when it comes to newly launched sites, things tend to get more and more difficult.

First of all, a new website has zero authority, zero backlinks, zero trust. You can see this when publishing a new page/post – for a new website, it could take days until that very page gets indexed while for an old and established website indexation rate could resume to minutes. So, the first sign that your website is gaining some authority is definitely how long does it take for a blog post or new page to get into Google index.

The second best thing related to terming a website’s authority is to check the ranks of your actual posts, by title. Just copy your title, paste in Google and see where it ranks. If it is a long and not-competitive title not appearing at least in top 3, you should be definitely building more content and trust before starting a link building strategy.

The biggest problem when it comes to new sites is link velocity – you cannot expect that a new website to get thousands of links in the second month of its lifespan (at least not in a natural way, unless you are publishing content that goes viral), and Google is well aware of this. A good rule would be to gradually start building links and probably the best “starter” links for a new website are social bookmarking ones.

Following the social bookmarking links you can easily continue with guest posts, blog comments and anything that is not automated in any way, to avoid link spikes/link velocity. Once you have started to become an authority in your niche (depending on if you want to follow the blackhat way or not) you can go further with links and get mass blog posts from different networks, link pyramids and so on.

Remember, when it comes to link building consistency is the key.

A sure way for getting natural backlinks to your website is without a doubt creating and sharing great content. Of course, the downside of this method is the fact that you will probably not get the keywords you are running after as anchor text but this ensures that you are building a fantastic link profile, thus starting to become an authority in your niche.

On the other hand, building content that acts like a links-magnet is most of the times difficult; you should definitely know what type of audience are reading your blog, what type of content are your audience interested in and so on. However, below you can find some great content ideas that can definitely make people linking to your posts:

1.     Be controversial

As dangerous as this may sound, you can create some controversial posts that attract hundreds, maybe thousands of links with ease. Whether if you are bashing competition, creating an article that is totally against “the crowds” or being the “bad guy”, these articles are a great way to increase your links in a natural way.

2.   Be a source of information

Although this may sound as a difficult task, in fact it is not. You could create researched graphs based on facts related to your industry, case studies results and so on. People like reading unique, researched content and will link back to your content. Probably the best example is David Mihm’s yearly “Local Search Ranking Factors”, a comprehensive online resource related to, obvious, Google Places. Released on June 3^rd, this single blog post gathered until today no less than 6,000 backlinks according to YSE and a PageRank of 4. Now that is something!

3.      Lists!

Creating lists attracts readers/backlinks because people usually like reading this type of content. Try to structure your blog posts as lists and you will definitely notice a difference in terms of sharing/linking back to source.

Running to get backlinks for a website/page  is most of the time a hassle-free task, especially when dealing with tough niches where quality is worth more than quantity. Whatever niche you would try to build links for, here are some great tips regarding how a brilliant link opportunity should look.

Relevance

Although relevance is still put under question by many SEO, it seems that links coming from relevant places provide more value than those not so relevant. A quick example would be: if you need web design links, relevant places would be web development, WordPress templates, Internet marketing, SEO. Indeed, a high authority website which targets dating niche can also be a good spot but without relevancy you lose a lot of value.

Anchor Text

Maybe the most important part of link building is anchor text. We cannot place enough emphasis on this, links with proper anchor text can make the difference between top rankings and no rankings. Do not overdo it though!

Website age

Aged websites tend to have more authority in the eyes of search engines so you should probably try to target sites that are online for at least more than 2 years.

Backlinks

A website with thousands of backlinks will definitely pass more value/juice to your targeted site. On the other hand, a website with let’s say PR6 but only 3-4 backlinks should definitely raise some questions (dropped domain anyone?).

Neighborhood

You definitely do not want your link to be placed near “buy pills” or “play poker” links, of course, unless you are promoting alike websites. Make sure you avoid this and you will probably get a great valuable backlink to your website.

Running to get backlinks for a website/page is most of the time hassle-free task, especially when dealing with tough niches where quality worth more than quantity. Whatever niche you would try to build links for, here are some great tips regarding how a brilliant link opportunity should look.

1. Relevance

Although relevance is still put under question by many SEO‘s, it seems that links coming from relevant places provide more value than those not so relevant. A quick example would be: if you need web design links, relevant places would be web development, WordPress templates, Internet marketing, SEO. Indeed, a high authority website which targets dating niche can also be a good spot but without relevancy you lose a lot of value.

2. Anchor Text

Maybe the most important part of link building is anchor text. We cannot place enough emphasis on this, links with proper anchor text can make the difference between top rankings and no rankings. Do not overdo it though!

3. Website age

Aged websites tend to have more authority in the eyes of search engines so you should probably try to target sites that are online for at least more than 2 years.

4. Backlinks

A website with thousands of backlinks will definitely pass more value/juice to your targeted site. On the other hand, a website with let’s say PR6 but only 3-4 backlinks should definitely raise some questions (dropped domain anyone?).

5. Neighborhood

You definitely do not want your link to be placed near “buy pills” or “play poker” links, of course, unless you are promoting alike websites. Make sure you avoid this and you will probably get a great valuable backlink to your website.