All webmasters want to promote their own websites and want to ensure that their websites rank higher than the website of their competitors. In other words all webmasters want to come to the top spot when it comes to SERPs. Among the different techniques used by webmasters, link building is by far the most effective. In order to optimize techniques used by webmasters the import insights are as follows:

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are important and Google recognizes the fact that webmasters can increase their website optimisation by building high quality in-bound links and a natural link profile.

How to build a natural link profile?

Backlinks are of 3 types and require 3 different approaches to build them:

– Natural Editorial Links – These are links that come naturally without any intervention from webmasters. They are based on the quality of content and if the content is good then it automatically attracts other websites to link to it.

– Manual Link Building – These links are created by webmasters through a manual process of submitting to directories, guest postings or paying for listings.

– Self- Created, non-editorial backlinks – These are low value links as they offer visitors an opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles.

What Factors are to be considered when doing Link Building

Natural editorial and manual link building practices only need to be followed as they are white hat practices and they comprise:

1. Stay Relevant

– Webmasters need to publish high quality, relevant content in order to attract natural editorial links.

– The relevance of the linking domain is important and as far as possible links should be from sites that are relevant to the content.

– The diversity of link types is very important as links should not be coming in only from one source such as blogs or social media profile descriptions.

– The link title is important and should contain relevant content and keywords so that they can be easily recognised by Google.

– Ensure that backlinks from older domains are also considered as they offer an edge over newer domains.

– Internal and backlink anchor texts should contain relevant titles.

2. Be care about the quantity

– It is important to measure the number of linking root domains
– Keep a check on the number of linking pages
– The number of links from C-Class IPs is a strong indicator that the backlink profile is natural.
– The ratio of nofollow and dofollow inbounds links has to be healthy one.
– Link building speed has to be natural – neither too fast nor too slow.

3. Do not lose focus on Quality

– Pay attention to the Page Rank
– Quality and word count of linking content makes a big difference.
– Links from top pages are best
– Contextual links are best.
– Keywords should appear in the tile of linking pages
– Poisonous anchor texts and low quality links should be avoided.

4. Be cautious in your approach

– Always link to trustworthy sites and do not participate in link schemes.
– Guest posts should be used but with caution.
– Sponsored links containing descriptions like paid link and sponsored links should be avoided.
– Site-wide links are not useful as they are compressed into a single link.

5. Pay attention to details

– Links from country specific top level domains can help boost ranking.
– Long lasting links from Wikipedia are useful.
– DMOZ listed websites get boosted in SERPs.
– As per experts schema.org is preferred by Google over RDFa or Microformats.
– Google differentiates between user generated content and site-owner content.
– Having too many 301 page redirects can affect a page’s rank.

To sum up
The best way to reach top of SERPs is through quality backlinks which provide a legitimate opportunity for conferring non search traffic, help a search engine crawl and index a website and help validate a site.