5 of the top ranking factors are all generally agreed to be ‘off-site’ factors.

1 Keyword focused anchor text in external links
2 Quality of external link sources
3 Quantity of external links
4 Diversity of link sources
5 Link type and placement

The reason so many of the main ranking factors are offsite are down to the level of control we have over them. For example all of our onsite ranking factors are in our full control! So for the less scrupilous amongst us, the onsite ranking factors are open to our own levels of spam / manipulation.

When i manage SEO for clients i obviously first sort out there onsite optimisation, thats the easy part, secondly i have to introduce a link building strategy, thats the hard part (and most time consuming).

Interesting Fact: – Most of your competitors (except in top level niches e.g. insurance, comparison sites, job sites etc) really dont have anymore than 50 unique top level links coming into there site.

This means that if you embarked on a ‘high quality’ link building campaign, you’d only need to build 5 high quality links a month over the course of a year to beat your competitors to the top rankings in the search engines.

By high quality links i mean….

1.         Every link is relevant; non-paid (free), one-way, non-reciprocal, non-three-way, static and without “nofollow” to our website.

2.         All Links are from different Class-C IP addresses.

3.         Not blocked by robots.txt

4.         NO rented or bought links

5.         All link pages have a recent Google cache (within the last 4 weeks).

6.         No links on sites that have been banned or blacklisted by Google.

7.         Only first level domains (TLD & ccLD)

8.         Links have been manually created / submitted over a period of time.

9.         No directory submissions, No forum posts, No blog comments, No social bookmarks, No ping sites, No classified ads, No guest books, No link farms, No spam sites and No links within newsgroups.

10.       No java links, jump scripts, framed pages, redirects, cloaking, CSS redirects, 301 redirects, dynamic links, flash sites/pages, hidden links, no string parameters, session ID’s, etc.

11.       Any guest blog posts or articles are unique and verified unique by copyscape and only used once.

12.       Page on which the link is placed has no more than 100 outbound links.

13.       Links are not be labelled or titled sponsored, links, ads etc.

14.       Links are active, permanent with no expiration dates and must not need any payment.

15.       No fake PR sites

16.       Link pages are related.

17.       Text links only, no image-links

That’s a lot of criteria to stick to when sourcing high quality links!

You’ll obviously back this up with your usual link building through blog and forum comments aswell as reciprocal linking etc as while the SEO benefit isnt necessarily there, the traffic element is.

So how do you get those much sort after high level links?

Easy, if you have a high quality site and want to find out how you can get 5 high level links each month, Contact me here through opening a support ticket and selecting General Support, make sure you send me your site/s URLs!