Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Robert Steers in SEO

Generally speaking there are three rules of thumb to ensure you are searching for the strongest link sources to build relationships with.

The first is that the website AND page are both relevant to your business.

Second you want the website AND page to be well ranked and have a high level of authority FOR YOUR KEYWORDS.

Third you want the website to have high traffic and to pass that traffic on to your business.

There are a few different ways you can build links, and mostly you will have to do this by hand. The strongest links can be found by using the following tools;

Directory Search Engine

You can use this tool to find directories that already rank well for your keywords. This will ensure that you are getting links back from websites that are building strong profiles and already have traffic associated with your keywords. After using the top directories from this search, we increased our pageviews by about 10% and we increased our ranking by a few points on some keywords. We get, overall, around 30% of our traffic from a few well placed directories.

Google Blog Search

Use this to find blogs that rank well for your terms and have posted information about your industry. Blogs are great for building relationships with because they already understand about traffic and the value of links.

OpenSite Explorer

This is by far the best tool for finding out where your competitors are getting their link value from. It assesses every page against a range of factors to find out how much authority that link is passing.

Link Market

This is an excellent resource for finding other websites that offer links and are looking to trade links in your industry. The best thing to do is, before accepting a link, is check out the website on opensite explorer and check their pagerank. This will give you an idea of whether the website is serious about link building or not. Some of our strongest backlinks have come from website that we have found in Link Market.

Links that you should be wary of

Article Directories

We are still vary wary of the effort to result value of article directories. Over the course of a year we probably have over a hundred links back to this website from articles we have written. However they are some of the lowest ranked links, as well as the lowest trafficked links, we have. They are probably not bad for a website when it is starting out, however very few, if any, of the website we compete against or use gain anything from article links.

Paid for links

We never pay for links, not even in the Yahoo directory. The main reason we question the logic, again, goes back to where your money is better spent. If you are only paying $5 for a link, then is the link even worth that much? If you are paying over $100 for a link, would you be better of sponsoring a local table tennis club? What about it you spent the money on a Facebook campaign?