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.