“Could you give me a list of all the high quality back links you have built to my website this month please?”
It’s a simple as that!
All the websites that appear at the top of Google for even moderately competitive keywords have strong and varied back link profiles. If your website is ever to get to number one for your chosen keywords, it must have a strong back link profile.
Therefore, your SEO supplier’s main task each month (between 60% to 80% of their time) is to build a strong and varied back link profile for your website.
At Essential Marketer we carry out more than five online SEO analysis meetings every day. As you can imagine, we see all sorts of websites and all manner of SEO services that have been carried out on them.
It is without doubt that the most common failing is that of link building. The poor link building we see usually takes the form of article submissions, blog commenting… i.e. the simple type of link building that can be given to the office junior.
It’s also far too often the case where we see no link building has been done at all for the customer. This is usually accompanied with the SEO supplier doing nothing but on-page SEO and constantly asking the customer for new articles and content to put on their website and in their blog.
So take our advice and use the best question to ask your SEO supplier.
An even better question is –
“Could you list all the high quality links you have built for my website and tell me what makes each link high quality?”
If your SEO supplier can answer the above question it demonstrates that, not only are they doing high quality link building, but also that they probably understand what high quality link building is.
These are poor quality links:
- a link from a brand new website that does not have any back links of its own
- a link from a webpage that does not appear in the Google index
- a link from a webpage with no page rank is usually poor quality
- a link from a webpage with more than 100 links
- a link from an image rather than a text link with anchor text
These are high quality links:
- a link from a homepage on another website that is at least five years old
- a link from page rank greater than one and only a few other outbound links on the page
- a link from a webpage that has more than 10 of its own back links
- all the above links are made even more powerful if the website is on the same theme as yours
So now you know the perfect question to ask your SEO supplier. If they don’t give you a satisfactory answer we would suggest you change to a company that understands high quality link building and give us a call today on 0845 508 5008.
