Not All Links Are Created Equal
Here are a few things to consider when deciding where to look for links to your site:
Site Popularity: A link from a popular site matters. So try to build alliances with sites that get a lot of visits and are well respected. It can be hard to get links from Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post, though, and may require a lot of attempts; don’t expect it to happen overnight.
Site Relevance: Find sites to get links on that complement (but don’t compete with) your own. Let’s go back to the baby accessories. A site about parenting or gift giving will be much more relevant than a site about extreme sports or accounting. If you have too many links coming from sources that aren’t related to what you do, they can end up being considered spam.
Trust: With all the fishy content out there, it’s not surprising that an endorsement or two from a highly trustworthy site will go a long way. Universities, charities, government, and community websites are all great ways to cultivate trust for your site if you can find the right angle.
Link Freshness: No one said this was easy. You go ahead and build a whole bunch of links up and then the sites becomes less popular; the signals start to decay, and you begin to lose points for lack of new links. This is an ongoing and time-consuming task, so if you can’t dedicate at least a few hours a week to it, try to find someone who can help you out to ensure you’re continually generating fresh links.
Social Media: While social media warrants a whole section for itself, the main thing to bear in mind here is that, while social media links may be in a slightly different class from other backlinks, having your content shared and liked is still a very valuable way of building site traffic. It goes without saying that you must make sure that all of your online profiles are active and up-to-date and that you post regularly.
Through analyzing links, search engines can see the popularity of websites and their individual pages based on the number of votes and the popularity of the pages linking back to them.